Senior councillors at Cambridgeshire County Council have criticised the Government for failing to address pay and conditions for social care workers to help recruitment.
Ministers announced this week that half the £500m promised to help address staff shortages would now be held back.
In a joint statement, the Chair and Vice-Chair of the County Council’s Adults and Health Committee, Cllr Richard Howitt and Cllr Susan van de Ven said: “We are profoundly concerned that Government’s Social Care Implementation Plan published this week does little to address the issue of pay and conditions for the social care workforce. This will be enormously detrimental to the challenge of sustaining and improving a vital workforce, across all providers including the County Council itself.
“With an average 9.5% vacancy rate in the social care sector in large shire county areas such as ours - higher than the national average - tackling the challenge of workforce capacity was a key plank of these proposed reforms, and a reduction in funding coupled with a lack of focus on pay and conditions will ultimately make it almost impossible to drive forward improvements.
“We are also dismayed that while the White Paper allocated £500m to support this work, the new paper halves this to just £250m over the next two years - an unrealistic figure that simply will not meet need. We call on Government for an immediate rethink.”
