Care home population spiked as sector hits breaking point

Issues present in social care are being overlooked as the number of people being entered into the sector continue to skyrocket.

New figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS), which were announced yesterday, found that the care home population reached 360,792 from the year ending February 2023 – an increase of 3.1% from the previous year.

As the number of people in the care sector continues to rise, this statistic has sparked concerns that the government doesn’t have any urgent plans to fix issues in social care that were highlighted when Boris Johnson was in power.

Back in November 2019 Mr Johnson, a former Prime Minister of England, identified eight key problems in adult social care including funding and the quality of care received. Following this, the government proposed reforms to help these problems, including introducing a cap on lifetime care costs, which were widely accepted although, as the government has changed parties two times since Mr Johnson was in power, the reforms have been delayed until October 2025.

However, this is simply not good enough. As well as uncovering that the number of people in social care has spikes, the research from the ONS also found that 37% of care home residents are self-funders with the majority receiving money from the government. Although, a key plank of the government reforms was intended to stop the cross-subsidisation of care fees between the lower fees Local Authorities can secure compared to what self-funders are charged.

The South East remained the region with the highest proportion of self-funders in care homes (47.5%), significantly higher than the North East, which had the lowest proportion of self-funders (26.4%).

The latest Laing & Buisson data shows that for residential care the average weekly fee for council-funded residents is £738 compared to £949 for self-funders – a 29% difference.

Stephen Lowe, director at retirement specialist Just Group, commented: ‘No rational person can imagine that with an ageing population the problem of social care will simply disappear. Yet the much-heralded social care reforms brought forward by Boris Johnson have already been delayed until October 2025. Given the economic situation there seems no certainty for implementation, even over that extended timeline.

‘NHS waiting lists are absorbing a lot of government time, but the health and capacity of the social care sector can have a material impact on how effectively the NHS functions. People working in the social care sector or trying to navigate their way through it, on behalf a vulnerable loved one, must be starting to feel abandoned by successive governments’ failure to address this problem.’

Image: Dominik Lange