Current funding pressures

Total net public spending on adult social care was £17.1bn in 2015/16, in 2018/19 prices. Of this, around half was spent on adults of working age – those aged 18–64. The remainder, worth an estimated £7.7bn, was spent providing services to people aged 65 and over. Of this, £2.7bn was spent on providing domiciliary care for 248,385 people, at an average annual cost of £10,898 per user. And £3.4bn of funding was used to provide residential care for 156,840 people, at an average annual cost of £21,664 per user. The remaining £1.5bn was used to cover the cost of other activities including commissioning services, and for providing means and eligibility assessments.

Services are provided by an estimated 20,300 organisations, delivering care from around 40,400 establishments. The majority are in the private or not-for-profit sectors. Some of this care is paid for through private arrangements and some is commissioned and arranged by local authorities. As a result, comprehensive national data on all social care activity and funding are limited.

Researchers at the Personal Social Services Research Unit (PSSRU) have developed a cohort-based microsimulation model to project future social care activity and costs based on data that are available. This model is considered state of the art in analysis of English social care and is widely used in this area of research. The PSSRU model estimates that cost and demand pressures for publicly funded adult social care will rise by an average of 3.7% a year in real terms between 2015 and 2030. This is slightly lower for younger adults, at 3.6% a year, compared with 3.7% a year for people aged 65 and over.

These projections are lower than previously reported, and lower than those used in previous reports from the Health Foundation and The King’s Fund. This reflects a number of changes including fewer people receiving services, lower estimated population growth, and lower projected growth in national wealth (measured using gross domestic product – GDP).

A recent clarification of the law means that staff must be paid at least minimum wage during sleep-in shifts, which is not included in the PSSRU modelling. The calculations in this report account for this by including an additional cost in back pay of £400m in 2017/18, and an additional £100m cost pressure in future years.

Including these, total demand and cost pressures are estimated to rise by an average of 3.7% a year, from £17.1bn in 2015/16 to £29.3bn in 2030/31. This is an increase of £12.2bn – around three-quarters of the current budget (see Figure 1).

Box 1

The PSSRU has created a model of adult social care activity and funding based on the current system in England. Using this, it projects total spending on both young adults and older people in need of publicly funded social care. This model has been used by the Department of Health and the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) to inform policy in the area.

Importantly, the PSSRU’s model is a projection of the current system under the latest available data and does not make specific forecasts about the future. The projections indicate the costs of the system based on the specific assumptions and trends in population and activity presented below:

  • The growth in population by age and gender changes in line with Office for National Statistics (ONS) 2016-based principal population projections.
  • Real GDP rises in line with OBR projections. Unit costs of care also increase as per OBR assumptions of productivity and marital status rates change in line with the Government Actuary’s Department 2008-based marital status and cohabitation projections, except that they remain constant for people with learning difficulties.
  • There is a constant ratio of single people living alone to single people living with their children or with others, and of married people living only with a partner to married people living with partner and others.
  • Prevalence rates of disability in old age and learning difficulties remain unchanged by age group.
  • Home-ownership rates and the proportion of older people receiving privately funded care change in line with projections produced by the University of East Anglia CARESIM model (a microsimulation model of finances for the over 65 year olds).
  • The proportions of people receiving informal care, formal community care services, residential care services and disability benefits remain constant for each sub-group by age, disability and other needs-related characteristics.
  • The proportion of the costs of publicly funded care met by older service users through user charges also changes in line with projections from the CARESIM model.
  • The supply of formal care will adjust to match demand and demand will be no more constrained by supply in the future than in the base year.
  • PSSRU do not assume any productivity gains in their projection modelling.
  • Staff pay is assumed to rise in line with OBR projections for rises in average earnings.

The estimated budget

There is not a nationally set budget for social care in England. Instead, spending is determined by each local authority, based on the size of their total budget and decisions on how much to allocate to social care versus the other public services they provide. There are currently some restrictions to this. Recognising the scale of the financial pressure on social care, the government has made additional central funding available to be spent on social care services through the IBCF. It also introduced a new social care precept for council tax, which means that councils could increase council tax by an additional 2–3% alongside normal increases, provided the money raised was spent on providing social care services. This meant that an additional £2bn was available for social care services in 2017/18, rising to £3.6bn by 2019/20. The actual and expected adult social care budget, and the IBCF and council tax precept are presented in Table 1.

Table 1: Actual and expected adult social care budget breakdown 2015/16 to 2019/20

Actual

Expected

2015/16

2016/17

2017/18

2018/19

2019/20

Budget for social care excluding IBCF and precept

£15.2bn ££15.2bn £14.4bn £13.8bn £13.5bn £13.3bn

£14.4bn

£13.8bn

£13.5bn

£13.3bn

Additional funding through IBCF and precept

£0bn

£0.4bn

£2.1bn

£3.2bn

£3.6bn

Adult social care funding incl. IBCF and precept

£15.2bn

£14.9bn

£15.9bn

£16.6bn

£16.9bn

NHS health transfer budget

£1.9bn

£2.1bn

£2.0bn

£2bn

£2bn

Total adult social care budget

£17.1bn

£16.9bn

£17.9bn

£18.6bn

£18.9bn

Between 2015/16 and 2016/17 public funding by councils for social care fell by 2.2%, from £15.2bn to £14.9bn. The latest plans show that spending for 2017/18 is expected to increase by 6.6% compared with 2016/17, to £15.9bn – this includes the additional £2bn described above. A further £2bn is also transferred from the NHS budget.

Estimating the budget beyond 2017/18

There are no official figures for social care spending beyond 2017/18, so we have estimated the funding that may be available. For 2018/19 and 2019/20 there are published estimates for the core spending power that will be available to local authorities, from which adult social care spending is allocated. This has been used to estimate the likely growth in funding for social care over the same period. This also assumes that the transfer from the NHS budget remains constant in real terms.

This core spending power includes the funding available from the social care precept and through the IBCF. As this must be spent on adult social care, it has been subtracted from the core spending power estimates, with the remainder being the amount that local authorities can choose to allocate to social care or other services. This remaining core spending is expected to fall by 2.5% in 2018/19, and by 1.1% in 2019/20. With no other information, we based our calculations on the assumption that social care spending excluding the precept and IBCF would fall by the same amount – from £13.8bn in 2017/18 to £13.3bn by 2019/20. The combined value of the precept and IBCF – worth £3.6bn in 2019/20 – is then added back on to this figure, resulting in a total spend of £16.9bn in 2019/20. Again, the additional £2bn from the NHS transfer is included, based on the assumption that it stays constant in real terms.

The budget is therefore estimated to rise by 4.5% in 2018/19 and by 1.8% in 2019/20. This would be an average increase of 2.5% a year between 2015/16 and 2019/20 in real terms, making a total of £18.9bn.

With no official estimates for social care or council core spending power beyond 2019/20, we have adopted the same approach as the OBR – to assume that total government spending, and therefore spending on social care – will rise in line with GDP growth. This provides a reasonable estimate for the funding that might be available for care services, but the true funding gap would clearly be heavily dependent on the actual outturn. The most recent estimate for GDP growth between 2019/20 and 2030/31 is 1.9% a year in real terms, which would see total spending rising by an average of 2.1% a year between 2015/16 and 2030/31, from £17.1bn to £23.3bn. This would be a slower rate of growth than the 2.5% estimated for between 2015/16 and 2019/20, but greater than the fall of 1.0% a year between 2009/10 and 2015/16.

Funding gap

With pressures expected to rise at an average of 3.7% a year, spending on services would need to rise by a total of £3.6bn between 2015/16 and 2020/21, and by £12.2bn by 2030/31. However, if the budget grows by 2.1%, as assumed in our calculations, this would leave a gap of around £1.5bn in 2020/21, rising to £6.1bn by 2030/31. Therefore, even maintaining quality and access via the model of public funding as it was in 2015/16 would need public funding for social care to rise faster than the growth in national wealth (as measured by GDP).

Figure 1: Adult social care funding pressures, 2015/16 to 2030/31

Scope for improvements in access and quality

The PSSRU projections are based on the system of care provided in 2015/16. So closing this funding gap would mean that the system is able to keep pace with growing pressures from rising costs demand and demand from this point. However, it does not allow for any improvements in the level of access to publicly funded care, or the quality of care that people receive.

However, there is a significant question over whether continuing at this level of care provision is publicly acceptable. Recent budget pressures mean that public funding for adult social care has fallen by 6% between 2009/10 and 2015/16, at an average of 1.0% a year. This has led to:

  • many local authorities changing their eligibility criteria so that only those with severe need are eligible for funding, compared with meeting high or moderate needs in some areas in 2009/10
  • a freeze in the cash-terms level of the capital means test thresholds at £14,250 and £23,250, rather than increasing them in line with inflation. This is effectively a 12% real-terms decrease in the thresholds
  • lower payments to providers of care services, which has led to greater instability in the provider market.

There may be some scope for reducing pressures through improvement to the productivity of service delivery. Our estimates are based on a model which assumes no growth in productivity over the 15 years modelled, which is consistent with estimates for observed productivity from the ONS. However, there may be scope for improvement. Recent research from the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, estimates that productivity among providers of social care in the UK is lower than in nine out of 10 comparison countries (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Relative productivity levels for social care in 2015, UK=100

While improving productivity is desirable and would reduce long-term cost estimates of funding need, it would likely require substantial upfront investment in new models of delivering care. The level of potential growth in productivity is likely to allow for only marginal improvements in access and quality. With major concerns commonly raised over the current stability of the provider sector,, it is likely any productivity growth would only support market stabilisation. Service users would therefore not see an improvement in quality – they would just not see any further decline.

Major improvements to access and quality

There is a strong argument that continuing to meet these pressures will still leave a high level of unmet need, and risk a collapse of the provider sector. Even if the model of funding is not to be changed, additional funding is likely to be required over and above our estimates to return to the level of access and quality provided in 2009/10.

To estimate the additional cost of returning to the previous level of quality, we have applied the 3.7% average growth in projected cost pressures from 2009/10, to provide an estimate for what the budget would have been if these pressures had been met through the current decade and out to 2030/31.

In this case, funding in 2017/18 would have been £24.3bn – 36% higher than the current plan of £17.9bn. To get back to this level in 2021/22 would require spending to rise to £27bn, and to £38.7bn by 2030/31. Based on the current plan, this would increase the estimated funding gap from £1.5bn to £7.8bn in 2020/21, and from £6.1bn to £15.4bn in 2030/31.

Figure 3: Estimated additional cost of providing the same level of service as in 2009/10, 2009/10–2030/31 (2018/19 prices)

In reality, there has been a range of improvements in how services are provided, in order to protect provision and quality as much as possible with falling budgets. Maintaining these improvements would clearly be desirable if additional funding is available, and doing so with a return to previous levels of funding may see service quality rise beyond the levels seen in 2009/10.

While funding at this higher level would undoubtedly lead to improvements for people who are eligible for care, it would not address the substantive concerns over the adequacy of the current model, which pre-date the current period of austerity. The alternative options for social care funding are explored in the following chapters.


‡‡ This is taken from NHS Digital analysis, which has a slightly higher figure for public spending on over 65 year olds of £8.2bn compared to figures quoted in Public Expenditure Statistical Analysis (PESA). This report uses the NHS Digital spending estimates as they are nationally recognised figures. Net spending is used instead of gross spending, removing private contributions for services users that are not funding from taxation.

§§ Direct payments (which are generally not payable long-term residential care at present) plus publicly funded domiciliary care.

¶¶ Figures do not sum due to rounding.

*** Based at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

††† Data on social care use in 2015/16, as well as the projections used, are from an update to PSSRU (2015). Projections of Demand for and Costs of Social Care for Older People and Younger Adults in England, 2015 to 2035. Available at: www.pssru.ac.uk/pub/DP2900.pdf. These data were provided by the PSSRU.

‡‡‡ This includes the increase in the national living wage – as a large number of social care workers are paid at or close to minimum wage, they benefit from the increases announced in the 2015 Comprehensive Spending Review.

§§§ Therefore projections are using a lower base level of publicly funded social care activity, which in turn leads to lower modelled growth.

¶¶¶ Growth in real-terms wages for an economy is linked to growth in the economy, so a lower rate of economic growth will result in lower growth in wages.

**** Now known as the Department of Health and Social Care.

†††† Excluding this £2bn, the budget for social care would fall from £14.5bn in 2016/17 to £13.8bn in 2017/18.

‡‡‡‡ It is ultimately the decision of local authorities how much to spend on social care for their population, though there are estimates for the relative need for care services (Institute for Fiscal Studies (2018). Adult social care funding: a local or national responsibility? Appendix A. Available at: www.ifs.org.uk).

§§§§ For example, if actual spending by local authorities is higher than we project, the funding gap would be smaller, and vice versa.

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