Agenda and minutes

There were no declarations of interest.

Select Committee Public Open Forum ~ Guidance

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Please use this link to access the papers for this item - available as part of the 19^th January 2022 Cabinet agenda. 

https://democracy.monmouthshire.gov.uk/ieListDocuments.aspx?CId=144&MId=4674

Cabinet Member Phil Murphy delivered the presentation.

Tyrone Stokes, Finance Manager for Social Care and Health, summarised the pressures on Adults Services:

Pressures within Social Care and Health that are pertinent to Adults Select amount to £2.3m. Of this, £1m is for Adult Social Care (SCH2), relevant to what is needed to provide the service next year. The majority of this pressure comes from the over-recruitment of carers to our in-house domiciliary care service, in order for us to provide domiciliary care to our clients due to the fragility in the external care market. The rest of the pressure is what’s been identified through doing the forecast this year. Just over £100k is the reduction in the Social Care Workforce and Sustainability grant, which contributes to core services. The remainder is from the Adults Select share of the increase to the real living wage, which amounts to £1.25m.

There are £120k of savings from increases in fees and charges; the majority of this relates to Adults services, particularly means-tested residential and non-residential services. Domiciliary care services are presently capped at £100 a week – this is the maximum that someone would be expected to contribute, according to the legislation. But there is no cap for residential care i.e. if someone is assessed that they can pay the full fees themselves, that is what will be levied.

Phil Murphy, Tyrone Stokes, Eve Parkinson and Jonathan Davies answered the members’ questions.

Challenge:

Could you detail the difference between £900k for DFGs and £250k for Access for All?

These are two different grants. The £900k was made up from the base budget (and increased to that last year) – we had temporarily made it up in previous years. DFGs are for disabled modifications, and Access For All is a separate budget.

Regarding Social Care and a shortage of carers, some have been asked if they’d like to obtain their own carers and get direct payments back. Is there a standard for the time between claiming the payment back and receiving it?

Direct payments haven’t changed: they have been in for many years. When someone is assessed by the social worker they are given the option of whether they would like a direct payment, to be used to employ their own carer. Once the assessment is done, and the care plan agreed, we always pay 4-weekly in advance, never in arrears. There might be a slight delay while we go through the costing and they set up a bank account but that’s always been the case, and the advance payment overcomes this.

What percentage of people go for their own carers and get direct payments? Has this increased recently?

Take-up is at roughly 200, 8-10% of what we provide in terms of our domiciliary care provision to clients. There has been a bit of increase over the last year in the request for direct payments which has presented some problems with capacity. We did have a backlog because there was such an increase and  ...  view the full minutes text for item 3.

The minutes were confirmed and signed as an accurate record, proposed by Councillor Powell and seconded by Councillor Harris.

The Housing Support Programme Strategy and Homelessness will be covered at the next meeting – the strategy needs to be submitted to Welsh Government by the end of March. A press release on Crick Road will be out soon which might provide the detail that has been requested. The 29th March meeting should perhaps come forward – the agenda item could be combined with the next meeting. The Chair asked that officers prepare a short report on Step Closer, for the next meeting concerning domiciliary care.

The Chair and Vice-Chair are unavailable for 15th February 2022, so the date of 2nd March 2022 was agreed instead.