Posts Tagged ‘Public Expenditure Outlook’

We have seen growing interest in the adult social care sector from private equity investors in the past couple of years. This note provides a high level briefing on the sector.

Like most of the rest of the public sector, social care has benefited from increased investment in recent years. Although total spend actually fell slightly in 207/8, gross current expenditure by Local Authorities (LAs) in England on Personal Social Services was £20.7 billion.  Of this, spending on Adult Services accounted for £15.3 billion, similar in real terms to 2006-07, of which  £8.8 billion (57%) was spent on services for older people. 48% of gross adult spending  in 2007/8 went on residential care, with 39% on day and home care and the rest on assessment and care management. Read the rest of this entry »

The leaking of the McKinsey Report on how to save money in the NHS to Health Service Journal seems finally to have kick-started a debate on whether, and how, health spending might be restrained. However it is interesting that the debate so far has been among professionals and experts such as the Kings Fund. The opposition moved quickly to paint the report as showing the government’s “true intentions” towards the NHS, contrasted with their own commitment to real terms spending increases (a case of the “biter bit” if ever there was one); meanwhile the government immediately said that it had “no plans to adopt these proposals in the future”, effectively rejecting the findings of a report which it had commissioned!

So more of the same so far: both sides falling over themselves to pledge support to the NHS, putting undue faith in yet more efficiency savings and ignoring (at least in public) the real challenges which the NHS and wider health spending will face in the next decade and beyond. Meanwhile some of the ideas in the McKinsey report have real merit and others are statements of the blindingly obvious, and all certainly merit sensible discussion.

We’ll provide further and fuller views on what might be the future for the NHS in a fuller commentary in a few days time – watch this space.

In recent discussions with investors we have found much confusion about the true facts surrounding the extent to which public spending is under pressure and how much government and opposition are likely to spend after the next general election. Our new commentary is intended to get behind a lot of political bluster and separate fact from rhetoric.

To read the commentary click here.