I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury) for securing this important debate. In February I asked the Chief Secretary to the Treasury how my authority is expected to meet the rising demands of adult social care and children’s services, despite devastating funding cuts. She argued that councils have been given the ability to increase council tax levels to pay for those services. However, that new flexibility—namely, to increase council tax to pay for social care, as my council has had to do—and indeed the introduction of the improved better care fund, have associated conditions that might limit the flexibility of some local authorities to spend on social care funding as well as local priorities, thus disproportionately harming low-income families. Austerity is expensive. It has not tackled the deficit; rather, it has passed it on to public services.
In March 2018 the National Audit Office reported that many local authorities rely on their savings to fund local services and increasingly find themselves in an unsustainable financial position. We cannot keep cutting their funding and expect them to do more with less. In my constituency there has been a real-terms cut of 10.6% in adult social care, almost double the national average, and the Government have committed no further funding for social care in the Budget. The money offered to councils in the local government finance settlement is nowhere near enough to calm the crisis.
My constituents have repeatedly described social services as a nightmare. In Peterborough, 17,638 people are over the age of 65 and, of them, 2,171 are unpaid carers and 6,802 live alone. Cambridgeshire and Peterborough clinical commissioning group would have received an extra
£30.3 million if it was funded in line with the national average. The CCG was ranked 204th out of 207 for the level of funding received from NHS England.
Services are overstretched, and the recent trends in the level of funding are unsustainable and unacceptable. Peterborough’s needs have been attended to on the cheap for far too long. As a consequence, cracks are beginning to appear in our services. Our needs have not been properly or adequately addressed, and the current settlement is blatantly below par.
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