Cuts to social care funding represent urgent threat to the NHS, warn experts

Successive cuts to local authority budgets are leading to serious gaps in social care availability to older people and are putting significant strain on the NHS, according to a new report by health think tanks the King’s Fund and the Nuffield Trust.1

The report, Social Care for Older People: Home Truths, published on 15 September said that older people were paying the price for cuts to social care and any help they might receive increasingly depended on where they lived and how much money they had, rather than their needs.

Both think tanks said that six consecutive years of cuts to local authority budgets by …