Council place directors have joined with their social services and public health counterparts to call for better overall funding to prevent infrastructure cash being repeatedly raided.
Speaking at the annual conference of ADEPT, Darryl Eyers (pictured), the organisation’s president and director for economy, infrastructure and skills at Staffordshire CC, set out ADEPT’s three priorities for the year: funding, climate change, and ‘communities and the infrastructure that supports them’.
He said that having worked with other local authority directors for children’s and adult's social services, public health and the Local Government Association on the issue of funding pressures, they had agreed to use the same narrative about the need for better funding.
Mr Eyers told delegates: ‘If ADEPT says one of its priorities is long-term, sustainable funding for place-based services, it’s impossible to look at that without looking at how we fund care services across the UK.
‘I felt that, even though we would always make the case for more funding in our areas of professionalism, as local authority associations we should take a step back and look at the funding that we have for local authorities overall – to not just fight each other for another slice of cake but collectively demand a bigger cake overall.’
In what he said was a statement that his colleagues across social care would be making simultaneously at their conferences, Mr Eyers said: ‘We are now at a point where increasing pressures on children’s and adult social care need to be properly funded but not at the expense of other key preventative local government services that can help create prosperous independent and resilient communities.
‘It is those preventative and wellbeing and place-based economic growth, infrastructure and environmental services that will prevent growing demand, exponentially in our care services in the short, medium and long term.
‘Local authorities can and do join these services up at a local level to deliver improved outcomes for our communities, but we need the right long-term resources to continue doing this.’
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