Hammond announces social care funding

Chancellor Philip Hammond has presented the 2017 Spring Budget, with the announcement of an additional £2 billion to be spent on social care over the next three years.

To help councils to provide high quality social care to more people and help to ease pressure on the NHS, Hammond announced an additional £2 billion of grant funding for adult social care over the next three years, with £1 billion available in 2017/18.

Much of the build up to Hammond’s last Spring Budget, before it becomes the Spring Statement, was focused on increased social care funding to alleviate the crisis currently facing the sector. The Liberal Democrats had called for an extra £4 billion emergency funding in the Budget for the NHS and social care services, calling for a new deal for ‘our NHS and care services’.

Additionally, according to a Local Government Association survey, 78 per cent of MPs said before the address that additional funding should go to councils' social care budgets, saying that the funding gap facing social care is at least £2.6 billion by 2020.

However only £2 billion has been made available over the next three years, alongside £425 million of investment in the NHS, also over three years.

Hammond announced a £100 million fund, set up to fund triage projects in A&E departments to help relieve pressure on NHS services in winter 2017.

Additionally, the Chancellor said that he expected some STPs to be available before the autumn, and therefore revealed that £325 million will be made available for them, in what became an address that Hammond said showed that the Conservative's were the ‘party of the NHS’.

Responding to the statement, Niall Dickson, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said: “This is good news – on social care the government has finally woken up to what many of us have been saying for some time – that hospitals and community services are desperately struggling, and that huge numbers of vulnerable older people are receiving inadequate or non-existent care.

“The extra funding will definitely help, but we await the details. We also welcome the announcement of a Green Paper on the long-term funding of social care - let us hope this time it results in action and not more words.

“The promise of additional capital funding to support local transformation plans is also welcome, but again we await the detail. Without this money it will be impossible to develop the new services that are so desperately needed."

Dr Mark Porter, council chair of the British Medical Association (BMA), said: “This budget does nothing to address the gaping hole in NHS finances. There is a £30 billion gap to fill and we should be increasing the UK’s health spending by at least £10.3 billion to match that of other leading European economies.

“We have a crisis in social care happening right now, so any funding to help provide the care patients so clearly need is a help. Failures within the social care system hugely affect an already stretched, overworked and underfunded NHS - most NHS trust finance directors have said that cuts in local authority social care budgets are adversely affecting NHS services.

“Our A&E’s are struggling because of an overstretched system. Having GPs in A&E won’t reduce admissions – if anything this could have the effect of attracting more patients to hospitals. The government also needs to explain how it will fund and recruit GPs to work on site at hospitals when there already aren’t enough to meet the needs of the public.

“The chancellor’s announcement of £325 million of funding for some STPs is unlikely to go far enough, and we know that the plans need at least £9.5 billionn of total capital funding to be delivered successfully. Our health service is one of the best in the world, but is, increasingly, failing too many people for too much of the time. Put simply, today’s budget does not go far enough to address this.”