This article forms part of the LGA think piece series 'Towards a sustainable adult social care and support system'.
Over the course of this think piece series, we and sector experts have set out a clear set of arguments that can be summarised as follows:
- Adult social care and support matters – for people’s lives, our communities, our NHS and our economy
- The ‘local’ dimension of care and support must not be jeopardised by national influence
- The way we, as a society, pay for social care needs to change – potentially quite radically – if we are serious about securing significant additional funding to ensure its future stability
- Political cooperation and meaningful engagement with the public are essential ingredients in building cross-party consensus
So where do we go next?
When the LGA started this series, the expectation was that the Government’s green paper would be imminent by the time of this final publication. Now it is not, and the LGA has taken the decision to write its own social care green paper for all adults, the ‘where next?’ question will be tackled in far fuller detail in the LGA social care green paper.
To reach an answer, we believe our own social care green paper must address the following:
- The role of local government in our lives
- The importance of social care in helping people to live their life
- Social care’s track record of delivery
- Pressures facing the sector and their consequences
- Workforce
- How care funding could be made fairer and how that could be paid for
- Social care and the NHS
- Social care and wider wellbeing
Your views on the LGA green paper, and the questions it raises, will be vitally important to us as we collectively seek to influence the future direction of adult social care and health.