The UK’s spending watchdog has accused the government of lacking a long term funded plan for transforming adult social care in England and cutting the budget for reforming the sector by 58%.
Ministers have diverted more than a billion pounds of the £1.7bn they committed to reform in December 2021 to other care priorities, the National Audit Office (NAO) says in a review1 of the government’s 10 year strategy, published in 2021, intended to “fix the crisis in social care.”2
Key reforms, including plans to develop the social care workforce, have been scaled back with political instability at the heart of government last summer and “two new sets of ministers” partly to blame.
The watchdog said that the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has no overarching programme to coordinate its reforms, “making it difficult to know if …