A new report from the county councils network (CCN) produced in collaboration with transformation and improvement specialists, Newton, claims that the Govt has underestimated the costs of new social care reforms to go live in 2023 until 2032 by around £10 billion.

If the analysis is correct and the Govt doesn't revisit its funding for the reforms then the conclusion is that a coach and horses will be driven at high speed through local authority budgets affecting not just social care provision but also the provision of wider council services.

Currently there are 500,000 people waiting for care assessments but when the reforms are in place this could expand to an extra 200,000 people annually and in a separate CCN report it was found that 77% of (rural councils) "said that they would be unable to allocate any more resources from other service areas to pay for any funding shortfall, whilst 9 in 10 (91%) said they were very concerned they would be unable to recruit enough staff." In county and rural areas, the recruitment requirements of the reforms would account for 60% of total council new recruitment needs.

Whilst saying that there was clear support from councils for the social care reforms, Cllr. Martin Tett, CCN's adult social care spokesperson added "there is a significant financial and operational cost to these reforms ..... and it will be almost impossible to recruit the extra staff required."

The knock on effects for other local authority service areas such as housing and private rented sector regulation could be enormous if the report is correct and extra Govt funding is not put in place (a difficult ask under current economic conditions) for these reforms. The shortfall in qualified and experienced officers in local authority housing departments has already been widely highlighted and this shortfall will only get worse if this report's predictions come to pass. All in all, a difficult circle to square.