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Social Care in the UK has reached crisis point - Age UK warns 30.01.2012

According to a study carried out by Age UK, thousands of vulnerable elderly people are missing out on care due to government spending cuts.

The £7.3bn budgeted for social care this year is the same as in 2011. However, due to the economic crisis, worsening living conditions and rising inflation, this amount represents a drop of 4.5% compared to last year's budget.

At the same time, local councils have been implementing austerity cuts and have reduced spending by 4.5%, which gives a total of £341m in monetary terms.

Further to this, local councils have no obligation to spend the government funding on social care only.

Age UK has estimated that there are around 2m people in England with care needs, 800,000 of whom are not getting any formal support.

The charity believes that this situation will be getting even worse in the coming years, unless measures are taken urgently to provide more money for front-line services.

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Source: Age UK online, http://www.ageuk.org.uk