Cut and Thrust

Lancashire County Council have published their planned spending for the next three years.
Adult Social Services have been subjected to significant cuts and those likely to have the biggest impact on the more vulnerable residents of Wyre are summarised here.

Raising Eligibility Levels
The proposal is to raise the eligibility level for accessing adult social care services from moderate to substantial. Currently Lancashire is one of only 27% of local authorities still offering services to adults assessed as having moderate needs with 73% now only offering services to those with substantial and critical needs. The proposal is that LCC now also offers support to those in the critical and substantial categories but no longer moderate.
There are currently 3900 residents assessed as moderate who would need to be reviewed before any services can be withdrawn. Allowing for the ageing population of Wyre there are probably around 400 Wyre residents who will fall into this category.

Reduction in Care Budgets
This will result in a reduction of up to 20% of expenditure on domiciliary care, day care and personal budget allocations. They will continue to meet the essential personal care needs of people but they will encourage greater use of Telecare, free access to rehabilitation, reablement and recovery services with the level of support provided to family carers being maintained.

Passing on the full cost of Day Care
Customers will be charged on the basis of recovering the full cost of the service received subject to their ability to pay. For example this would mean recovering the actual charges for day care ranging from £30.75 to £53.80 rather than the current charge of £5 per day. Charges for home care would range from from £11.96 to £ 13.15 per hour rather than the current charge of £11 per hour and where two carers are required then both will be charged for, rather than the current charge which is based on one carer. Charges for home delivered meals will rise from £3.25 to around £4.05
Based on LCC's own figures the average increase for 5000 current residents will be around £12 per week and for a further 2000 it could be in excess of £50 per week. So around 700 Wyre residents will be faced with these levels of increase.

Reducing Fees for Services
The proposal is to reduce fees to service providers in 2011/12 by 2% and no increase in 2012/13 and 2013/14. This will apply to nursing, residential, day and domiciliary budgets for all service user groups, as well as personal budget allocations which are directly linked to the current cost of service provision.
With inflation currently running at 3.5% this will amount to a total reduction of 5.5% for 2011/12 and 3.5% for 2012/13 and 2013/14 or nearly 13% over three years.

Care services will become both less available and less affordable. This at a time when the combined effects of inflation, fuel, VAT and commodity prices are reported to cost pensioners in excess of £700 more per year.

The Wyre Senior Forum are aware of these changes and are focussing their attention
on what they believe to be three key drivers that will help counter their effect:

- Increase our efforts to ensure that older people claim the benefits they are entitled to.
- Energise the community into identifying and assisting vulnerable residents in times of
individual hardship and extreme weather.
- Ensure that informal carers are identified and supported.

The forum is currently pursuing these three themes with Wyre Borough Council and other partners.