By the day, harsh reality in local government draws closer and closer to the once unthinkable nightmare portrayed by the infamous Barnet ‘graph of doom’. Social care, for adults and children, is eating your local town hall.
For the uninitiated, the graph of doom was sketched in 2011 by officials at Barnet Council in north London to illustrate, purely hypothetically, what would eventually happen if the trend of remorselessly rising demand for social care across the generations was to continue without radical change. In short, within 20 years there would be no money left for any other services.
It was a neat concept and it made a good slide for presentations. No one seriously thought it could ever come to pass. As Nick Walkley, who was Barnet Council’s Chief Executive at the time, recently told The Guardian, ‘We never envisaged an un-solution.’
Well, here we are 13 years later and we are living with that un-solution. Adult social care and children’s services are between them devouring the lion’s share of local authority budgets – reports of up to 80% in some cases – as councils prioritise statutory duties at the expense of parks, libraries, leisure services and bin collections. Treasurers keep casting anxious glances to the horizon, but there’s no sign of the cavalry.
Ministers hailed February’s local government finance settlement for 2024-25 as a 7.5% increase in cash terms for councils in England, ‘making available up to £64.7bn’. Note the careful phrasing: the figure assumes every council raises council tax and the additional social care levy by the maximum allowed without a referendum (a total of 4.99%).
As the Health Foundation thinktank points out, however, this rise – which includes about £1bn extra grant earmarked for adult and children’s social care and the £500m boost announced in January – still leaves local government with some 12% less in spending power in real terms than in 2010-11. Councils, it says, have been left facing ‘near impossible’ decisions to cut services.
This is going to continue, regardless of who forms the Government, as long as we stumble on with the un-solution to how we fund adult social care. Children’s services have their own challenges in desperate need of fresh answers – safeguarding, residential care costs, special educational needs and disabilities – but the adults’ sector has been teased with an on/off reform package now for more than a decade.
There is no sign of either the Conservatives or Labour going into the coming general election with a pledge to ‘get social care done’ any time soon. A twice-delayed cap on personal liability for care costs plus revision of the hopelessly outdated capital limits for state support are due to take effect in October 2025, having been first proposed in 2011, but don’t hold your breath.
Instead, the present Government is focused on measures to upskill the care workforce and make the job an attractive career, accelerate adoption of assistive technology and make much better use of data. Labour is committing to more radical workforce reform, including a pioneering ‘fair pay’ deal in the first 100 days of a new Government that would be replicated later in other sectors, and is talking vaguely of ironing out variation in the quality of care.
Both parties are approaching wider adult social care reform as a 10-year project. They are each, undoubtedly, fighting shy of promising more meaningful change in their election manifesto this year because of the risk of being attacked by the other for planning a ‘death tax’ or ‘dementia tax’ to fund it.
Why should they be so scared? Because the Tories did exactly that to Labour in 2010. And Labour, in turn, did it to the Tories in 2017.
So, the graph of doom looks set to keep climbing. We in social care can do no more than our best to keep our doors open, keep campaigning for the change we need and keep faith that our elected leaders will finally find the courage to embrace it on the other side of the election.
David Brindle is former Public Services Editor of The Guardian. He is chair of Ambient Support.
Email: [email protected]