Plan to reform social care has ‘gone awry’, say MPs

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The government’s plan to fix the crisis in social care in England over the next decade has “gone awry”, according to a report by parliament’s spending watchdog, which called for a clear strategy to tackle shortfalls.

The House of Commons public accounts committee said on Wednesday that the Department of Health and Social Care “worryingly” had no road map for achieving its target to improve the quality of social support services beyond 2025.

Campaigners and health leaders have called for urgent action to support services under huge financial pressure and to tackle a devastating workforce crisis.

Vacancies in the social care sector exceeded 152,000 in March 2023, with one in 10 jobs not filled, according to the committee’s report.

“Two years on from its [the government’s] long-awaited white paper ‘people at the heart of care’ — a 10-year ‘vision’ for adult social care — plans for reform have once again gone awry,” the MPs said.

Former Conservative prime minister Boris Johnson promised to “fix” the crisis in social care once and for all when he was elected Conservative party leader in 2019.

The reform white paper, published in December 2021, promised to boost staff skills and allow elderly and disabled people to live independently for longer.

However, Dame Meg Hillier, PAC chair, said: “Years of fragmented funding and the absence of a clear road map has brought the adult social care sector to its knees.”

“While an NHS-style workforce strategy for social care may not be feasible, the DHSC must set out how it will provide leadership across the sector to identify and address workforce challenges,” she added.

In 2022, the government allocated £2.7bn in additional social care funding to local authorities in response to the growing pressure facing the sector. However, the committee said it was “unconvinced” whether the funds had provided value for money.

The report comes just months after the National Audit Office, the independent public spending watchdog, concluded that ministers were failing to co-ordinate and track the progress of its decade-long £1.7bn plan.

The report, published in November, said more than £1bn of the budget had already been reallocated to deal with “other social care priorities”. It added that the health department had not yet established “an overarching programme to co-ordinate its reforms”.

The Department of Health and Social Care said: “We are committed to reforming adult social care and have invested up to an additional £8.6bn over two years to meet the pressures facing the sector, grow the workforce and improve hospital discharge.”

It added that the government would invest up to £700mn on technology and adapting people’s homes to allow them to live independently.