The amount likely to be spent on community support (mainly home care) is set to break the York Council budget this year. Expenditure of £6.6 million is being reported against a budget of £3.8 million.

Direct payments (where clients make their own care arrangements from a given budget) are set to exceed its £2.6 million budget by £0.4 million.

The residential car budget will also be overspent by £470,000.

These are amongst the worst projected budget outturn figures ever reported to a Social Services meeting which is being held only 2 months before the end of the financial year.

An officer report on the crisis says, “the Homecare service has been substantially redesigned and has been successful in signposting customers with low level needs to other forms of provision. This has meant that the number of customers has remained stable despite the growth in the number of potential customers, but it does also mean that the customers receiving the service have more complex needs.

This is one reason why, despite unit costs going down following the outsourcing of the service weekly, spend on our home care contracts has increased from £54k a week in July 2011 to £82k a week in December 2012.

In March 2011 there were 553 customers receiving 7 hours a week home care on average.

There are currently 720 customers (on the tiered contracts alone) receiving an average of 8.1 hours of care per week”.

The York Council is due to announce in early February its budget plans for the forthcoming year. It is likely to increase Council tax levels by 2% and spurn government offers of additional grant aid.

It will need to act decisively if it is to bring the quality and costs of social services back under control