Budget will lead to 'bed-blocking'

Patients are losing out through bed-blocking

Extra cash for the NHS announced in last week's Budget is at the expense of social services and will lead to more "bed-blocking", the Liberal Democrats have said.

A 6% real-terms rise in social services funding announced after the Budget would not remove the pressure on the NHS.

Health and social care are two sides of the same coin - under-invest in one and you undermine the other

Paul Burstow

Lib Dem spokesman for older people, Paul Burstow, said that even with the extra resources, social services were still being short-changed.

Local councils needed £1.5bn to cope with the demand just in 2002/02 and that would rise to £2.7bn by the end of the current Parliament.

But the annual growth in social services spending in England was £360m a year.

Mr Burstow said social services were being underfunded

Mr Burstow said that the upshot of this shortfall was a lack of space in care homes which would lead to delayed discharges from hospital when beds were badly needed for other patients.

In a report entitled Tackling the Crisis in Care, he argued that ministers had failed to take fully into account the increasing demand for care from both the young and the old.

But Mr Burstow insisted that no extra money would be needed to pay for the increased spending on care.

Instead the money should be taken from funds set aside for the NHS - although he would not say which health services should get a smaller slice of the pie.

Blame-game?

Mr Burstow said: "The government is in denial about the scale of the crisis in our care system.

"Health and social care are two sides of the same coin - under-invest in one, and you undermine the other

"Without adequate investment in social care, the NHS will be choked with cases of delayed discharge.

"Alan Milburn's policy of penalising local authorities if they fail to find care settings for elderly people is quite simply the Whitehall blame-game gone mad, especially when the government has presided over the loss of nearly 50,000 long-term care beds in the past five years."