Dorset's funding help call over state of social care

Council leader Spencer Flower will tell the new Prime Minister and Health Minister of the need for additional funding to help counties like Dorset which have a higher-than-average number of older people.

The letter, although already drafted, is now unlikely to be sent until well after the funeral of the Queen.

The plan to send it was revealed by Deputy Council leader Peter Wharf who has warned of the potential for a “huge hole” in the authority’s adult social care budget.

Many Dorset care sector businesses have closed during Covid and the sector continues to have problems recruiting and retaining staff.

A staggering 22 per cent of all social care beds in the county are currently empty, more than 700 spaces – although hospitals are having trouble discharging patients because social care cannot be arranged, leading to a backlog on wards.

Many of the social care beds are available, but not in use, because care home owners cannot find enough staff to operate them, or because they cannot afford to re-open sections of homes they had already mothballed to help defer rapidly rising costs.

Profit margins for smaller operators are said to be around 5% with many reporting year-on-year loses. The optimal operational size for a care home is said to be 62 beds yet few in Dorset have that many.

Dorset councillors have heard of mounting concern for the sector where around a third of all staff leave each year for other jobs, often in hospitality and tourism, even though these sectors are also traditionally low payers, and often only offering seasonal or zero-hours work.

Problems in recruiting staff have been compounded by the rising cost of travel to and from work and many foreign workers having returned home drastically reducing the size of the available workforce.

Skills for Care, the industry training body, suggests that in Dorset another 3,600 care workers will be needed by 2035.

Dorset Council has been able to offered some help to the sector locally with an uplift in contract payments and help with recruiting and training – although with limited success so far.

Cllr Cathy Lugg said that without affordable housing for care workers, close to where they are needed, the situation will only get worse.

“People who aspire to work in the care sector cannot afford to live here,” she said.

Around 1,850 people are in residential care in Dorset at the present time, the majority of them entirely funding their care from their own resources.

This is likely to change with planned reforms which may mean councils having to step in and offer financial support for a larger number of people than it currently helps.

Concerns have also been raised about planned national changes to the social care funding system which will put an additional burden on council staff with an expected big rise in assessments and further bills for the council’s adult social care budget to help meet care costs for those who have already spent up to the new limit on their care set by the Government.

Prior to the recent changes in leadership the Government suggested it would fund much of the cost of the new system, but Dorset Council’s deputy leader Cllr Peter Wharf has warned that the new arrangements still has the potential to leave “a huge hole” in the council’s finances.

All this comes at a time when more of the county’s population are needing care as they age and become unwell.

Perversely some better-off people are going into residential care before they need to, only to run out of money and then call on Dorset Council to then step in and help fund some of the cost of their care later in life because the limit of their assets has fallen below the nationally-set minimum limit.

Dorset currently has around 3,500 social care beds – 54 per cent of them being used by people who self-fund their own care; 24per cent contracted by Dorset Council and 22per cent vacant.