Warwickshire councillors warned that £15 million black hole in adult social care support is ‘unlikely to be cut’ this financial year

Warwickshire County Council has a duty to provide care and budgeted more than £211 million for its social care and support services in 2024-25.

It currently expects to spend £228.5 million the gap tallied up through various larger overspends with some offset by money being saved.

The key areas include a £7 million overspend on services for the disabled aged over 25, £3.719 million of which is on supported living and £1.474 million on residential care.

Care for older adults comes in more than £6 million over budget across nursing, domiciliary and residential care, while another £2.5 million has to be found to cover costs associated with mental health.

Councillor Ian Shenton (Con, Arden) raised the persistent nature of overspends.

“We talk about the £15 million overspend but in fact, the overspend is £17.3 million because we bolstered it with reserves,” he said at this week’s meeting of the county's adult social care and health overview and scrutiny committee.

“We’re seeing some savings but I’m nervous about the expectation that it’ll come down – we haven’t seen it come down up to now and we’re in the final three or four months (of the financial year) when services are likely to be more in demand rather than less.”

Director of social care and health Becky Hale replied: “We’ve talked a number of times about the demand coming into adult social care is significant and the complexity of the cases coming in is also significant.

“We’ve been around that £15 million overspend all financial year and that is driven by numbers of people and their packages of care.

“We’re doing a number of things to try to support and bring that down but that won’t bring it down significantly and our forecast is that’s still where we’ll be at the end of the financial year.

“I would say that some of these reserves are specifically for adult social care, that does improve the picture and some of that’s due to the one-off nature of some of those things.

“We expect, and we’ll find out more through the settlement (money from government for councils), that there’ll still be provisions moving forward.”