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Lauren Revans finds out why the government’s £300m investment in social services for older people has received a mixed response from social care professionals.

Last month the Local Government Association called on the government for £300m this year “to help avert a crisis in social care services”.

Health secretary Alan Milburn and local government secretary Stephen Byers responded by announcing a £300m “cash for change” initiative, spread over the next two years, to tackle the problem of delayed discharge  (News, page 6, 11 October).

Despite the obvious discrepancies – not to mention conditions for reform – the LGA hailed the investment as a lobbying success. In particular, it welcomed the government’s decision to hand the money directly to councils, rather than channelling it through the NHS.

The strings attached were outlined in a new “agreement” between the statutory and independent health care, social care and housing sectors. The agreement talks of closer working between commissioners and providers of services for older people, stating that “early and on-going involvement” of the independent sector providers is no longer optional, but essential. But speculation is rife about who will be the agreement’s beneficiaries. Unsurprisingly, many in the independent care home sector are delighted with the announcement. The National Care Homes Association – whose vice-president Barry Hartley was one of five representatives of the independent care sector involved in the development of the agreement – describes the move as “an opportunity to restore confidence to the sector”.

Others hearts, however, are proving harder to win. Public sector union Unison has criticised the government’s failure to grant the money “condition-free”.Unison’s national officer for social services, Owen Davies, explains: “It is nonsensical for the money to be specifically earmarked for spending in the private sector when some local authorities need the money to keep open their own residential establishments.”

Kent Council described its £2.1m share of the £100m available for the rest of this financial year as “a short-term drop in the ocean”.

Director of social services Peter Gilroy says the government is also wrong to infer, by tying the money to the new agreement, that local government is failing to work innovatively with the private sector.“I have had three independent inspections of my procurement processes,”

Gilroy says, “and on every one they have been commended. “To say that, by having some arrangement with the private sector, somehow it will be all the things you want it to be is naive. The costs of care are greater than the money available. It’s as simple as that.”

But LGA project manager for health and social affairs Jeni Bremner believes the agreement’s emphasis on the independent sector is no more than a reflection of good practice in commissioning in local government today.

Similarly, chairperson of the Association of Directors of Social Services older people’s committee Glenys Jones – one of three statutory sector representatives involved in drawing up the agreement – says it is impossible to ignore a sector that accounts for three-quarters of local authority-supported placements.

She denies that the initiative is about dealing with the “bigger  problem” of the level of fees paid to independent care homes by some cash-strapped councils. Stressing the initiative is about capacity building, ADSS president Moira Gibb warns: “If it is not adding places, it is not solving the problem.” One element on which everyone seems to agree is that the long-term care sector needs serious longer-term investment. The £300m will help, but will not by itself resolve the deep-seated problems of local authority fees and home closures. In addition, by couching the problems associated with long-term care provision within a wider discourse about cutting NHS waiting lists and emptying NHS beds, the government appears to be saying that local authorities are worth helping only as a means to achieving progress in the health system, rather than in their own right. As chief inspector of social services Denise Platt notes in her 10th annual report: “Waiting list pressures have tended to cut across the whole system’s development of intermediate care facilities.”

Agreement at website www.doh.gov.uk/buildingcapacity