Council leaders urge tax rise to solve adult social care crisis - Alzheimer's Society comment

The Local Government Authority (LGA) said that the current system was at "breaking point" after decades of underfunding by successive administrations, and needed a massive cash injection.

Ahead of the National Children and Adult Services Conference on Wednesday, the LGA released a survey which suggested that more than half of people (56%) would back an NI increase to fund better care and warned that - despite recent Government cash injections - adult social care services face a £3.5 billion funding gap by 2025. 

Sally Copley, Director of Policy and Campaigns at Alzheimer’s Society, said:

'The LGA paints an unhappy but unsurprising picture. People with dementia are the biggest users of adult social care services, and our Helpline is inundated with calls from families at the mercy of this crumbling system.

'Someone in the UK develops dementia every three minutes, and it’s impossible to tell which of us will need costly support in future.

'While the Government must properly fund the system, we can also chip in for social care as we do for the NHS - either via a new approach to taxation or some other way of pooling risk across society, to end the injustice in the current system that leaves people with dementia facing financial ruin or going without.

'Successive Governments have shirked the issue but I urge Matt Hancock to put forward brave proposals in the forthcoming Green Paper that address the issues raised by our Fix Dementia Care campaign, and commit to the sustainable social care funding that people with dementia have already waited too long for.'