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The rising number of older adults, many with long-term conditions or limitations in activities of daily living, is expected to increase demand for social care services and for housing options to accommodate their future care needs. Additionally, an increasingly diverse population may require care models that respond to different preferences, beliefs and values. This study aims to explore how preferences to meet future care needs vary across demographic, socioeconomic and care-related factors.
Examining the care gap in England. The provision of adult social care by local authorities in England should, in theory, be based on an individual’s need and ability to fund their own care. But this is not what is happening in practice.
There is substantial variation in the levels of care England’s local authorites provide to older adults.
There exists a damaging geographical and demographic ‘care gap’ in England that means access to care for older adults is increasingly based not on need but on other factors – some perhaps less surprising, like local levels of deprivation and disability, but some more so, like the number of older people who live in an area.
That this nationwide variation is not new should not excuse the government from action. That it has grown and may well continue to grow as the over-65 population of England outpaces that of all other age groups makes that action more urgent.
But to act well government needs to better understand the problem and how and where this care gap is forming and is at its most extreme. This is what this report, the latest in our Performance Tracker Local series supported by the Nuffield Foundation, seeks to help it do.
