Your views on our proposal to change the way we work out how much people pay towards the cost of their non-residential care services

Overview

Norfolk County Council plays a huge part in people’s lives – ensuring children and young people have the best start in life, protecting vulnerable people, maintaining a safe road system and helping to create a thriving economy.  We’ll continue to spend over a billion pounds every year providing public services that you, your family and friends use every day.

Norfolk is facing some big challenges though.  Our population is growing, people are generally living longer and the type of services that people need is changing.  And as you know, the cost of living is going up.  As things become more expensive we also have higher costs, and the amount of money we have coming in isn’t keeping up.  At the same time the grant that central government gives us has fallen by £189 million since 2011 and is expected to fall to zero by 2021.

Even though we are proposing to increase council tax next year, the amount of money we hope to raise wouldn’t be enough to balance our budget.  This means we have to make some difficult decisions about how we spend your money.

Since 2011 we have saved £334 million.  However, we now need to save a further £125 million by 2021. 

We have therefore been looking at how we can save money on our 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. 

We have to get the right balance between spending money on people’s existing care needs and spending money that helps people live well and independently in the community.

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.  First of all we carry out a financial assessment to see what people can afford to pay.  The assessment looks at how much money people have coming in, as well as their expenses. 

Some people have extra expenses because of their disability, illness or mental health condition.  We call this disability related expenditure or DRE.  If people have disability related expenses it reduces the amount we ask them to pay for their care.

Currently, we assume that everybody who has non-residential care has some disability related expenses and use a standard amount for these when working out how much we ask people to pay.  If people’s expenses are more than this standard amount they can ask for all of their expenses to be taken into account.  This reduces the amount they have to pay.

Last year, after carrying out a consultation we changed our charging policy to better reflect what people actually spend on their disability related expenses.  We changed the standard amount we take into account from £15.00 a week to £7.50 a week.

We now want to consult on a further change to our charging policy. We are now proposing to stop using a standard amount altogether and instead only take people’s actual disability related expenses into account.

This means that the amount that some people will have to pay towards their care will change and some people will have to pay more.  The amount that people will have to pay will depend on their income, expenses and the amount of disability related expenditure they have.

If our proposal went ahead we estimate we could save £400,000 in 2018/19.

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.   

We are consulting through:

- Individual letters to everyone we think might be directly affected by our proposal

- This online consultation, which is also available as a paper copy.

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 proposals.

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

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

What happens next

We will take a report about the findings to this consultation to our Adult Social Services committee on 15 January 2018.  The report will feedback what people have told us about the potential impact of our proposal.  The feedback will also be reported at Full Council on 12 February 2018.  Members will use this as part of the evidence they take into account when making a decision about what savings to make.