Ahead of next week’s local election, figures show Newcastle City Council’s budget is increasingly being absorbed by adult social care costs.
Data published by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) shows the cost of providing adult social care across the city rose from £96.6m in 2018-19 to £161m in 2024-25.
This represents the second largest increase in the country when measured against overall spending.
In 2018-19, adult social care accounted for 36% of Newcastle’s total service spending, excluding education, rising to 45% in 2024-25 – the second largest proportional increase nationally, behind Hammersmith and Fulham, which rose from 31% to 41%.
Next week, on 7th May, Newcastle’s local elections will take place, with parties setting out how they would improve the management of adult social care.
Labour, who runs the council, said it was already reforming services in Newcastle, including introducing new community teams, while the carer’s allowance had been increased nationally.
A Labour spokesperson told the BBC, who were first to report on this story, that the city’s Social CarePoint teams had prevented hospital or care home admissions and helped people remain at home independently.
They added: ‘Further changes are planned to integrate with children’s services to ensure a seamless transition and a rollout of the Connect to Work programme will allow adults to gain the confidence and support they need to achieve paid employment.’
However, Connor Shotton, Conservative candidate for Kingston Park and Dinnington, said his party would cut costs by merging council departments which ‘share responsibilities’.
‘We would look line by line at the budget to look at merging the departments together to create less back office and put that back into frontline service.’
Mr Shotton said energy, communications and human resources teams could be combined with other departments.
A Green Party spokesperson said they will focus on ‘fairer taxation’ to ‘properly’ fund social care.
They stated: ‘We’d focus locally on shifting more support earlier so fewer people reach crisis, improving pay and stability in the care workforce and joining services up better with the NHS and community organisations.’
In the North East, data from the MHCLG shows Sunderland City Council saw adult social care spending rise from 33% to 40% over the same period.
Hartlepool Borough Council and Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council also saw significant rises in the share of budgets spent on children’s social care, increasing from 24% to 34% and 25% to 35% respectively between 2018-19 and 2024-25.
Image: Karl Moran/UnSplash
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