Social care

This presentation was given at the launch of the IFS Green Budget 2017.

In yesterday’s English Provisional Local Government Finance Settlement, the government announced councils will be able to set a ‘Social Care Precept’ of 3% a year over the next two years, rather than the 2% a year previously planned, to raise additional funds for adult social care. We calculate that yesterday’s announcements could increase the amount available to spend on adult social care by a maximum by £700 million over the next two years relative to previous plans. But they provide no boost to spending beyond that.

A special issue of Fiscal Studies published today looks at patterns of individual level health spending across a range of countries, and finds some important similarities. It shows how health spending is concentrated in the last years of life, how significantly more is spent on the poor than on the rich and how health spending tends to be concentrated on a relatively small number of people with high needs.

The dynamics of social care in England at BILS Conference 2016

Presentation given at the Scottish Government Strategy Unit Seminar Series.

This article was written for the National Council for Research Methods (NCRM)'s newsletter

In this Observation, we assess the empirical evidence on what has happened to health and social services spending in England and Wales since 2010–11. We find that the relative degree of protection offered to these services does differ between the two countries.

This presentation was given at the launch of the IFS Green Budget 2015.

This week the Care Quality Commission (CQC) published comparable information on all GP surgeries in England for the first time, with the aim of identifying which practices should be prioritised for newly introduced inspections. Understanding whether, and why, some GP practices fail to provide quality care is important given the vital role that GPs play within the NHS. In recent years, there have been substantial changes to the organisation of GP practices, with a shift away from single-handed practices towards practices with six or more full time equivalent GPs. A new IFS report published today finds that small, and in particular single-handed, GP practices are more likely to provide poorer quality care than larger GP practices, as measured along a number of dimensions. This suggests that the trend towards larger practice sizes may have had beneficial effects on the overall quality of primary care provided.