azure charitable enterprises
Cramlington
In recent years, our ability to generate funds from our charitable businesses
has become increasingly important to our clients as budgets for the provision of
care services (for our clients) have been progressively reduced (since 2009/10).
Years of significant under funding (of Local Authorities across the country),
coupled with rising demand and costs for care and support, have combined to push
adult social care services to breaking point. Since 2010, Local Authorities have
had to bridge a £6 billion funding shortfall just to keep the adult social care
system going. In addition the Local Government Association estimates that adult
social care services face a £3.5 billion funding gap by 2025, just to maintain
existing standards of care, while latest figures show that councils in England
receive 1.8 million new requests for adult social care a year – the equivalent
of nearly 5,000 a day. Decades of failures to find a sustainable solution to how
to pay for adult social care for the long-term, and the Government’s recent
decision to delay (again) publication of its long-awaited green paper on the
issue is increasingly problematic as political leaders (national and local)
remain reluctant to discuss and inevitably determine that increases to income
tax (e.g. 1p on basic rate income tax), and/or national insurance premiums (e.g.
1p increase) and/or council tax (e.g. 3%) are unavoidable and entirely
necessary. While Azure is a non-political organisation, we are naturally
concerned by the failure of policy-makers to grip what is, after all, a fairly
rudimentary exercise in basic arithmetic. Moreover, from a practitioner
perspective, the fragility of the system is illustrated most starkly by the
number of care providers that are reluctantly closing their operations or
returning contracts to Local Authorities with the result that there is
significantly less choice and a lack of capacity to support the rising number of
people with care needs. The Centre for Economics and Business Research have
recently reported (December 2018) that 59% of the providers they surveyed
(nationally) have said that they have had to hand back contracts over the past
year and 68% have said they will need to do so in the near future. Service
closures are obviously the last resort for any provider; and it is at odds with
the way Azure and the majority of our fellow providers usually operate,
particularly when we have supported individuals for the majority of their adult
lives. It is, however, the clearest indication yet that the under funding of
social care is having a deeply negative impact on providers and their ability to
deliver critical support to vulnerable adults. We are indeed fortunate (to an
extent) that the charitable businesses we operate - and public support for them
– helps to sustain our care services. We are however concerned (and for many of
our fellow care providers) that there is now: an untenable, over-reliance on the
goodwill of an already-overstretched charity sector (that is already subsidising
the delivery of care services); an entirely ill-advised presumption that the
funding gap can be met by armies of unpaid or under-paid carers; an assumption
that the approach to the delivery of care can be re-designed to balance budgets
and deliver economies without having an adverse impact on the nature and level
of care clients need.
