Azure Charitable Enterprises

In recent years, our ability to generate funds from our charitable businesses has become increasingly important to our clients as budgets for the provision of care services (for our clients) have been progressively reduced (since 2009/10). Years of significant under funding (of Local Authorities across the country), coupled with rising demand and costs for care and support, have combined to push adult social care services to breaking point. Since 2010, Local Authorities have had to bridge a £6 billion funding shortfall just to keep the adult social care system going. In addition the Local Government Association estimates that adult social care services face a £3.5 billion funding gap by 2025, just to maintain existing standards of care, while latest figures show that councils in England receive 1.8 million new requests for adult social care a year – the equivalent of nearly 5,000 a day. Decades of failures to find a sustainable solution to how to pay for adult social care for the long-term, and the Government’s recent decision to delay (again) publication of its long-awaited green paper on the issue is increasingly problematic as political leaders (national and local) remain reluctant to discuss and inevitably determine that increases to income tax (e.g. 1p on basic rate income tax), and/or national insurance premiums (e.g. 1p increase) and/or council tax (e.g. 3%) are unavoidable and entirely necessary. While Azure is a non-political organisation, we are naturally concerned by the failure of policy-makers to grip what is, after all, a fairly rudimentary exercise in basic arithmetic. Moreover, from a practitioner perspective, the fragility of the system is illustrated most starkly by the number of care providers that are reluctantly closing their operations or returning contracts to Local Authorities with the result that there is significantly less choice and a lack of capacity to support the rising number of people with care needs. The Centre for Economics and Business Research have recently reported (December 2018) that 59% of the providers they surveyed (nationally) have said that they have had to hand back contracts over the past year and 68% have said they will need to do so in the near future. Service closures are obviously the last resort for any provider; and it is at odds with the way Azure and the majority of our fellow providers usually operate, particularly when we have supported individuals for the majority of their adult lives. It is, however, the clearest indication yet that the under funding of social care is having a deeply negative impact on providers and their ability to deliver critical support to vulnerable adults. We are indeed fortunate (to an extent) that the charitable businesses we operate - and public support for them – helps to sustain our care services. We are however concerned (and for many of our fellow care providers) that there is now: an untenable, over-reliance on the goodwill of an already-overstretched charity sector (that is already subsidising the delivery of care services); an entirely ill-advised presumption that the funding gap can be met by armies of unpaid or under-paid carers; an assumption that the approach to the delivery of care can be re-designed to balance budgets and deliver economies without having an adverse impact on the nature and level of care clients need.