Issue - meetings

To consider the attached report of the Director of Finance & Business Services / Strategic Director, Places & Organisational Capacity.

Prior to going through the Quarter 1 Finance and Performance report for Adult Social Care, the Officers from the Directorate provided some background information in order to contextualise the budget position.

Lorraine Butcher, the Strategic Director of Children, Families and Adults, noted that it had been well documented that the adult social care system, both nationally and locally was under considerable pressure. The recent White Paper ‘Caring for our future: reforming care and support’ (July 2012), demonstrated that the Government was aware of the need for change and reform and to some extent the White Paper also suggested how this reform would be achieved. Having said this, Lorraine Butcher explained that the changes proposed in the White Paper would take time to be implemented and in the meantime the Council was undertaking a number of steps to ensure that the budget was being managed correctly.

For instance, Lucia Scally, Head of Strategic Commissioning and Safeguarding, reported that the Directorate had recently invited a consultant to carry out an independent review of the Adult Social Care budget spend over the life of the Council. Part of this review had included bench marking the Council with other CIPFA (The Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy) comparator authorities in terms of the following:

·         Review of business plans and proposals to achieve financial sustainability for Adult Social Care

·         Review of fees to providers

The key conclusion from this review was that the prices that the Council paid for care and support were aligned to those in other authorities. However, the amount and type of care and support was greater when compared with the other CIPFA Councils e.g. use of nursing care. Additionally, Lucia Scally noted that the demographics of Cheshire East meant that the Council had to provide high cost individual support packages to deal with an increasingly older population. In summary, the Council had to address these pressures on the budget but in order to do so a change of approach was required. Lucia Scally explained such a change would require the Council to move away from a traditional approach of providing care for people to helping people to re-gain independence from care support, drawing on the existing assets in the local community and by continuing to support unpaid carers.

In light of this background, Dominic Oakeshott, Head of Business Management and Challenge presented the Quarter 1 Finance and Performance Review highlighting the following key points:

·         The Adults Service had a net budget of £98.6m with an emerging pressure on this budget identified at £11.4m.

·         The pressures on the budget were primarily from care costs, particularly for those customers with learning disabilities.

·         £7.3m of remedial measures had been identified which would reduce the net forecast position to an estimated £4.1m overspend.

·         That the service had been able to manage the demand for services which had resulted in limited growth in the number of new customers entering services. In part, this could be attributed to the enhanced use of re-ablement services.

It  ...  view the full minutes text for item 15