THE next government has been told to fix the “broken” social care system as local authorities buckle under the cost.
Councils have slashed their funding of other services by 40 per cent in the past decade to look after the elderly, a report has found.
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Libraries, leisure centres and museums have all been shut as adult social care services gobble up an increasing slice of the pie. The cuts have hit the poorest hardest, with the most deprived boroughs cutting budgets by a third over the last decade, the Institute for Fiscal Studies discovered.
Spending on routine maintenance of roads is down 53 per cent over the past ten years, while homelessness services have been cut by nearly three-quarters, the study found.
Report author Tom Harris said: “Social care accounts for 57 per cent of councils’ non-education budgets. This has meant big cuts to a whole raft of other services. It may be difficult to squeeze much more from these if councils find their budgets under further pressure.”
Meanwhile, Sir Andrew Dilnot, who wrote a flagship report on social care in 2011, said Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn must come up with a plan to fix the “broken” social care service.
He went on: “The amounts of money involved are significant but they are not enormous compared to some of the figures bandied around for other services.
“This really is a critical issue. If we can’t get this right, we can’t feel very proud of ourselves as a nation.”
