Local authorities spent almost a billion pounds more on adult social care this year despite a downward trend in the number of service users receiving long-term care.
While there was an increase in the number of requests for adult social care support this year, compared with previous years, the number of service users receiving long-term care fell.
There were almost 2m requests for social care, from 1.4m new service users. This is an equivalent of 5,420 requests a day, up by 170 on the previous year.
However, this comes as the number of service users fell to a new low of 818,000, part of a downward trend beginning in 2015-16. NHS Digital said this trend is due to a ‘decrease in those aged 65 or over’ and the effects of Covid.
In 2021-22, £16.6bn of total social care expenditure went to long-term support, £0.9bn more than the previous year.
In a sign that services were facing extreme difficulty, the number of users who say that they were very or extremely satisfied with their care fell to only 9%, down from 64% only two years before.
