Source · Select Committees · Health and Social Care Committee
Recommendation 6
6
Acknowledged
Unpaid carers face significant personal and financial costs due to social care reform failures.
Conclusion
Unpaid carers are bearing the highest cost from successive governments’ failures to reform adult social care. They provide care worth £184 billion, “equivalent to a second NHS”, but this is often unrecognised and comes at great personal, emotional and financial cost as well as a cost to their own health. Carers can’t do the vital work they do to support the formal system if nobody is caring for them, and the moral and financial case for doing so is clear. We were not able to find official estimates of the cost to the Exchequer of the failure to properly support unpaid carers’ employment opportunities. However, given that one study placed it at £1 billion in 2012 the potential return on investment for supporting unpaid carers could be substantial. (Conclusion, Paragraph 47)
Government Response Summary
The government agrees that publishing cost estimates of delayed discharges would improve transparency and will explore how best to publish this data, acknowledging methodological challenges.
Government Response
Acknowledged
HM Government
Acknowledged
We agree that publishing cost estimates broken down by delay reason would in principle improve transparency about the impact of delayed discharges. There are some methodological challenges involved in estimating costs attributable to delayed discharge, with any estimate necessarily relying on a number of assumptions rather than providing a precise attributable amount. We will explore how best to publish cost data with these caveats.