The Wiltshire Care Partnership (WCP), which represents and supports many independent providers of residential care homes, nursing homes and care at home for older people and adults with disabilities in Wiltshire, has issued a stern warning that George Osborne’s Budget introduction of the “National Living Wage” will have a ‘disastrous effect’ on social care across the county.
While the WCP welcomes the broad aims of the government’s economic policies, they say: “…we are concerned that the unprecedented year on year increases built into the new National Living Wage will have a disastrous effect on the social care sector in Wiltshire.”
“Care providers simply cannot sustain any further increase in their labour costs – which typically represent 60% of their total running costs – without receiving a matching increase in funding from the local authority and NHS.”
They explain that care homes have already experienced “particular financial pressures” from the cuts in local authority spending on social care. And they cite Wiltshire Council’s aim of cutting £618,000 from the social care budget by 2018.
The WCP state categorically: “…the continuing gap between the true costs of delivering safe, quality care and the price that the local authority can afford to pay is placing the future sustainability of the whole care market at significant risk of failure.”
“If Wiltshire’s commissioners are unable adequately to fund the capacity of a healthy and sustainable care market in the county, it follows that the burden will fall on NHS acute care to fill the gap while increasingly scarce care services are sought for publicly funded citizens. This is neither affordable nor desirable from anyone’s perspective.”
WCP are calling on the government to provide adequate ring-fenced funding to local authorities to protect the elderly and adults with disabilities from the impact of both the general cuts and of the “National Living Wage”.
