Caring for those who need help is what societies do, and the UK is long overdue a social care “moment”, to quote Baroness Casey’s update on the Casey Commission’s progress1. As with much of the P2030, the Universal Care Service (UCS) aims to set the foundations for a new, national, universal service. It does not fix social care – it begins to build the service. The Casey Commission will have reported by 2030 and a new government will be under pressure to take action.
£2 billion is budgeted in Year 2, scaling up to £7 billion in Year 4 funded by the new Property Tax as it is phased in. Delivered through local councils, it establishes a permanent budget line dedicated to social care. The allocation to councils uses a version of the per-capita distribution model for other locally delivered services, using a need-weighting that directs more funding to councils with more care needs. UCS is an addition, not a replacement for, existing Adult Social Care precept included in Council Tax. That precept is folded into the funding allocated to councils from Property Tax revenues.
The UCS should be seen alongside the Community Housing, Right to Life, Skills Centres, and Employment Freedom policies, which provide buildings and labour to support the care work. UCS also sits in a tapestry of newly funded local services which cascade value between them, including Community Food Centres, Service Hubs. The local Democracy Revival reform strengthens scrutiny of the kind of complex commissioning the UCS will involve.
The UCS will repair care services hollowed out since 2010 by expanding capacity to restore prevention and early-intervention measures across a range of ages. Some illustrative outcomes we can expect from £7 billion:
- 100,000 additional adult care packages, reversing the 58,000-strong decline in older people receiving state-funded care over the last decade and creating headroom for demographic growth.
- Council-set fees move toward cost of care, preserving several hundred care homes a year that would otherwise close and freeing several thousand NHS hospital beds at any given time as social-care-driven delayed discharges recede.
- Several thousand looked-after children move into placements closer to home as in-house and voluntary-sector capacity grows away from the high-margin private chains.
- Early help and family support is restored to roughly 200,000 more families a year than the post-2010 settlement reached.
- Care leavers retain continuity of social-work support across the full 17-to-25 cohort, rather than falling off the current support cliff at 21.
The actual shape of UCS will be driven by local government. Councillors, armed with more resources, should be able to use innovation and local priorities to maximise the outcomes for their communities.