Time for action is now

摘要

Readers with a keen memory might recall that on the eve of the 2010 General Election the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services warned that social services were unsatisfactory, underfunded, and unfit for purpose. It was never an easy thing for an organisation which oversees the commissioning and management of those services to say - but say it we did. Five years on, and with the publication of our annual survey of social care budgets for 2015, have things got better or worse? Have our warnings been heeded? Or ignored? And, bearing in mind that my predecessor David Pearson warned in March this year that 'the next two years following May's General Election will make or break adult social care,' what is the state of play as we enter the sixth year of austerity? We know that some 400,000 fewer people today are not receiving - in one form or another - the social care services they would have done four years ago: this at a time when demographic pressures suggest that more and more older and vulnerable people are growing, or ageing, into need.