Responding to the publication today (Friday 10 November) of
Reforming adult social care in England by the National Audit
Office (NAO), Simon Bottery, Senior Fellow, The King’s Fund,
said:
‘The National Audit Office (NAO) report shows that Department of
Health and Social Care (DHSC) is struggling to deliver even the
limited reforms to adult social care that it had promised. It is
particularly worrying that progress on workforce reform – the
scale of which had already been reduced - is glacial, with the
only real action being in international recruitment. Development
of a career pathway for care workers – a critical reform given
vacancies in the sector – has stalled. Plans for Care Quality
Commission (CQC) to assess local authorities social care
performance have also been delayed.
‘The only positive news is in digital and data, where
digitisation of social care records is progressing, albeit more
slowly than planned. Altogether, with the introduction of a cap
on lifetime care costs already delayed to 2025, this programme
represents only a small sliver of what was promised by the
government in 2021.
‘The NAO raises serious doubts about whether even this will be
delivered before the next election. At a time when adult social
care has never faced more profound problems, with record numbers
of people requesting support, this is an utterly inadequate
response.’
