Getting from here to there will be tough and rough. Baroness Louise Casey’s commission on the future of social care is now due to report next summer, a year ahead of its original deadline. Between now and then, however, lies the 2027 council tax rise. For many of us, it will be a huge shock – and social care costs will be blamed.
Thirty-six cash-strapped English councils have this year been allowed to borrow a total £1.5bn in ‘exceptional financial support’ from Government. Most, but not all, have social care responsibilities and cite them as a main driver of their problems. Required to produce credible turnaround plans in the next few months, they (and potentially others) will be contemplating seeking permission to exceed the 5% cap on council tax increases, which includes the ring-fenced 2% social care precept introduced as an expedient in 2016 but now an annual fixture.
Some of the figures being mooted are eye-watering: in London, Wandsworth has said it is planning a 94% rise – I shall repeat that, 94%, just in case you thought I meant 9.4%. The council is one of five boroughs in the capital that are not among the 36 but which already have licence to go above 5% next April because of the severe impact on them of the Fair Funding Review, designed to make Whitehall grants to local authorities more equitable.
Barnet, which is one of the 36, is expected to be among those that ask to exceed 5%. Its council tax levels have been described as ‘historically low’ in an independent audit report and it says it would need to impose an increase of more than 30% if it was to meet Government assumptions of the revenue it should be raising locally.
Readers with long memories may recall it was Barnet that, 15 years ago, famously produced a ‘graph of doom’ showing how the relentlessly growing costs of statutory social care and children’s services would eventually devour the council’s entire budget. Now the council is saying that if it cut all its remaining non-statutory spending, it would save only £18m a year of the £200m it needs to find by 2029.
Simon Radford, Barnet’s cabinet member for financial sustainability, describes the task facing the council as ‘mammoth’. He is warning of ‘a brutally honest conversation’ with residents and of ‘painful decisions’, including near-certain reduction of bin collections.
There are going to be brutally honest conversations up and down the country in coming weeks as councils wrestle with their budgets. There will also be media attention. The esoteric and hard-to-illustrate detail of the Fair Funding Review is unlikely to surface in quite the same way as film packages of care homes and homecare visits.
On the plus side, it will at least focus minds on social care and the pressing need to act on whatever Casey comes up with. But it is hard to escape the thought that reform of local government finance needs to be part of the picture too. Taking social care funding away from the town hall could be a solution with broad appeal.
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David Brindle is a social care commentator and former Public Services Editor of The Guardian. Email: [email protected] LinkedIn: @David-Brindle