Social care review seeks £651k savings

TOWN Hall chiefs at Warrington are to examine a range of options for providing adult social care in-house services in the future.
The appraisal will be carried out against a background of required savings of £651,000 on a current budget of £8.6 million.
Currently, the adult social care in-house service employs 320 staff and provides services to more than 2,000 people.
Over the past five years the service has undergone radical redesign and restructure.
Learning disability and physical disability services have merged with the closure of three day centres, supported tenancies teams have reduced in size and management has been restructured, reducing overall managers by a third.
The respite team for learning difficulties has been restructured, resulting in a reduced team size.
Wider directorate re-organisation has reduced posts across the service.
Alternative delivery options include a local authority trading company, outsourcing to a private sector operator,
outsourcing to a voluntary sector organisation, a staff mutual and social enterprise
or a joint venture partnership.
A report to be presented to the borough council’s executive board by Cllr Pat Wright (pictured), portfolio holder for health and
wellbeing, says: “Taking into account the current financial climate and savings already achieved, the question needs to be asked about how current services could be further redesigned, reshaped and redeveloped to enable them to be sustainable.”
More than 93 per cent of the council’s adult health and social care services are now commissioned externally and increasingly the emphasis is on high quality, effective, value-for-money public services rather than who actually provides the service.