Your views on our proposal to change our Adult Social Care charging policy

Overview

This consultation includes some detailed information about our charging policy. If you would prefer to read a simpler version, please use the Easy Read one which you can find at the bottom of this page. Alternatively, you can watch a short (8 min) video summary here.

Norfolk County Council helps make the county better for everyone who lives or works here or travels to Norfolk. The many services we run include ensuring children and young people have the best start in life, providing the fire and rescue service, protecting vulnerable people, maintaining a safe road system and helping improve the economy. We spend over a billion pounds every year providing public services.

The use of our services, particularly by those becoming older, is growing every year. Demand is rising but the amount of money we receive from central government is declining; we now receive £204 million less each year, compared to 2011/12, and this is also expected to fall to zero by 2020/21.  

We have developed a financial strategy to overcome these challenges through these principles:

• Offering our help early to prevent and reduce demand for specialist services
• Joining up our work so that similar activities and services are easily accessible, done well and done once
• Being business-like and making the best use of digital technology to ensure value for money
• Using evidence and data to target our work where it can make the most difference.

Since 2011/12 we have saved the best part of £364 million, including £246 million of efficiency savings. We are proposing to save £79 million, including new saving proposals for 2019/20 to 2021/22, over the next three years and we are also identifying ways of bridging a remaining gap of £45.98 million.

Even though we are proposing to increase council tax next year, by the minimum required to put our finances on a sound footing, the amount of money we hope to raise wouldn’t be enough to balance our budget. 

This means we must continue to make some difficult decisions about how we spend your money.

The council has therefore been looking at how we can save money on all our services, including adult social services.

We currently spend around £1m each day on adult social services. However, the demands on adult social care continue to change so even with the investment we are making in services, we still have savings to find if we are to continue to meet people's care needs. 

Our charging policy sets out our approach to charging people for their non-residential care. These are services that help meet people’s social care needs in the community.

We want your views on our proposal to change our charging policy which are about how we work out how much people have to pay towards their non-residential care. If our proposal went ahead it would affect how much we ask people to pay.

There are two parts to our proposal:

1. We are proposing to use different rates of Minimum Income Guarantee (MIG)

2. We are proposing to take the enhanced rate of the daily living component of the Personal Independent Payment (PIP) into account

If both parts of our proposal went ahead we could make a saving of up to £5 million a year.

However, we are proposing to invest up to £1 million in more support to help people find jobs and in more financial advice and guidance.

And, depending on the outcome of the consultation, we would need to decide what changes, if any, we would make and when to make them. The way we carry out any changes might affect how much we would save.

This means that when planning our budget for 2019/20 and 2020/21 we have only included a saving of £3 million.

Why your views matter

We want to find out what people think about our proposal and how it would affect them if it went ahead. Your views will help us to decide if we should change our charging policy. We are also interested to find out what help and support people would need if our proposal went ahead.

We are consulting through:

• Individual letters to people we think might be directly affected by our proposal.
• This online consultation, which is also available as a paper copy.
• Engagement with Making It Real Norfolk.

We are consulting from 5 November 2018 to 23 December 2018. Please note that if we receive any consultation responses after this date we cannot guarantee that we will be able to take them into account.

We will feed back the findings from our consultation to our county councillors as part of the evidence they will use to help them come to a decision about our proposal.

If you need a copy of this consultation document on paper or in a different format, please email haveyoursay@norfolk.gov.uk

Before you start: 

It’s a good idea to download a copy of the consultation document just in case you want to use it as a reference when working through the online survey. 

Find out more and have your say online by clicking on the feedback form below.