Swindon Council plans to outsource adult social care

SWINDON Council wants to outsource its entire adult social care service. Proposals going before Swindon Council’s cabinet tonight would set in motion the establishment of a social enterprise to run the service from April 2011.

The company would be responsible for running both the adult social care service, including day services, domicilliary care and the like, and the community health workers currently provided by the Primary Care Trust (PCT).

It would affect services such as One Step Ahead, the Upham Road Centre and many more.

The Government has announced its plans to disband PCTs and from April next year none of them will be able to provide services any longer. It has also encouraged the setting up of social enterprises to run some public services.

Some councils have already announced they are to outsource almost all of their services to social enterprises but it is not yet know what route Swindon will take. This comes just a week after Swindon Council voted through £5.3 million of cuts to this year’s budget, including £1.52m from adult social care alone.

Council and PCT staff would be expected to transfer over to the new company under the same conditions. And the proposals going before cabinet also include setting up a different ‘arms length’ company to run the council’s children’s services department.

Coun Peter Mallinson, cabinet member for adult social care, said they had looked at 10 different ways of running the service and came up with the idea of a social enterprise as it allowed greater staff ownership and the profits would be reinvested back into the service.

“The council would be more like a commissioner and the social enterprise would be the provider of the service,” he said. “From my point of view I think it is the correct way to go, but the proposals have to be put to cabinet first.”

If approved, the council will start putting together a business case for the company. Only then will the financial details of how it would operate be known, although it is thought that much of the income would be from grants and charging people who use its services.

Coun Mallinson insisted that this was similar to how the department operated now.

He said: “We will be charging no more than we currently do. At the moment people can pay out of the personal care budgets they have for what they want. We’re not asking them to dig into their own pockets and pay for something. Obviously we are dealing with an area of vulnerability here so we have got to be careful.”

The company’s contract would be reviewed every three years and a service level agreement would ensure the same level of care was provided as now.

Coun Mallinson said: “This is not the complete product, this is just the first stage of seeing if cabinet thinks this is a viable position.

“The business case hasn’t been worked through yet.”

But Labour councillors have spoken out in opposition to the plans, saying handing large parts of the public sector over to employees alone could spell the beginning of the end for a public say on public services.

Coun Steve Allsopp (Labour, Parks) said: “This is hasty and without proper public consultation. Focusing only on putting employees in the driving seat completely ignores accountability to the public.

“There are other ways to ensure proper use of public resources. There are also huge risks in telling hundreds of public sector workers that in only a few months they will work for a stand-alone company.

“Government plans to make the NHS and social services in England obey European Union competition law also threaten the livelihood of dedicated workers who would have to re-tender for contracts in a few years, up against large national and even multinational firms.

“That is surely not the way to create any sort of locally accountable big society.”