Adult social care is 'area of concern' for Wiltshire Council finances
Councillors have been discussing their forecasted overspend
The pressure of adult services on Wiltshire Council’s finances has been further discussed, during the scrutiny of the local authority’s second quarter financial position.
With a current forecast overspend of £6.2 million for the year, adult services remains a worrying section of their budget.
Speaking at the overview and scrutiny management committee meeting on Wednesday (27th November), cabinet member for finance Cllr Nick Botterill described it as “an area of concern”.
This comes after the council’s second formal update of the 2024/25 financial year showed that its overall previous forecast overspend had been reduced from £8.2 million to around £861,000.
However, Wiltshire Council say they're not immune to the challenges local authorities are facing nationally with the cost of social care, particularly adult services.
Increased demand and the increasing cost of care packages, particularly in complex cases, has led to it being the main sticking point of the council’s budget.
Cllr Botterill told the meeting: “Local authorities are between a rock and hard place on this and fundamentally we’ve had promises from government to sort this out and nothing has come through.
“It looks like the current lot are equally not going to come up with any great solutions to what is fundamentally to do with an ageing population and the inability of the care service to be able to constrain its costs.”
Cllr Ruth Hopkinson noted: “It’s our statutory responsibility to provide those services and at a sufficient level to be able to provide the care for which it is intended.
“There are occasions where some of things that are not our statutory responsibilities have to be dented in order to make sure we are legally compliant.”
Earlier this month, the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services (Adass) said that the financial challenge facing adult social care continued to be “as bad as it has been in recent history”, with services under “intolerable pressures”.
An Adass survey found that four out of five local authorities were on course to overspend their adult social services budgets, and over a third had imposed another round of cuts mid-way through the year.
Labour’s recent budget planned for councils to receive a 3.2% funding, whilst provider costs are likely to rise by up to 9% next April, when the national living wage goes up by 6.7%, and NI wage thresholds are lowered.
An extra £600m for adult and children’s social care was also announced in the budget, but councils have warned this will not be enough.