FAIR COST OF CARE .. CONTINUED

As we discussed last week, the Government has announced an initiative called Fair Cost of Care, which is attempting to address the funding issues in care homes and home care.

There will be £1.2 billion of extra funding, spread between both sectors.

The UKHCA estimated that there were 249 million hours of home care delivered in England in 2016.

This includes private hours, but as the market has grown since then, and since local authority spend outweighs the private market, this may be a reasonable assumption for local authority hours, in the larger UK market, in 2022.

So if all of the extra money went into increasing home care prices (which won’t happen), this implies a price increase of around £5 per hour.

This might get the average price up towards the UKHCA’s suggested rate of £21.43 per hour.

But it falls well short of the £31.32 per hour which we estimated as the true cost of a half hour service.

So whilst the extra money is of course welcome, it will only be a small step in the right direction.