National 'care bank', not market solutions, can avert cash crisis

There has been the National Audit Office (NAO) report citing "systemic rather than just local failure" and criticising a perceived lack of urgency or strong leadership from the Department for Education to address it. That report prompted the public accounts committee to call an urgent hearing to interrogate the department's plans. A Unison survey last week found that 88.5 per cent of social workers do not believe government plans for social care reform address the concerns the profession is facing.

Several commentators, including Sir Paul Ennals and Professor Ray Jones, have critiqued the NAO for failing to do justice to the complexity of the crisis; for not spotting the correlation between family poverty, local deprivation and spiralling demand; and for not "joining the dots" that connect huge increases in child protection registrations with the scale of service cuts beneath the threshold for statutory intervention. The sirens of a systemic crisis are also being sounded from other points of the care system.