Have your say on charges for arranging social care support for adults who pay the full cost of their care

East Sussex County Council will spend £579.6 million on vital services this year. To set a balanced budget, we had to find savings of £13.5 million and use £11.4 million of our limited reserves. We face ongoing financial pressures due to increased costs and demand for services, as well as long-term reductions in Government funding.

Social care support helps people aged 18 and over to live healthy and independent lives. We look at people's strengths, capabilities, support network, community and difficulties and work with them to find solutions.

Care and support services are not free. Most people pay some money towards their care costs. The amount they pay is based on what they can afford. People with more than £23,250 in savings and assets (capital) are required to pay the full cost of their care, although they can still ask the council to arrange their care for them.

We currently arrange care at home for around 2,400 people who pay the full cost of their care. There is no charge for this service at the moment.

Over 2,000 (or 80%) of these people are using technology-enabled care services such as Lifeline alarms, sensors, detectors, medicine reminders and key safes. The other 400 people access other types of care, such as support at home from a paid care worker.

Each year around 500 new people who pay the full cost of their care will ask for help to arrange it. Around half will only be accessing technology-enabled support.

Local authorities are not usually allowed to charge fees to cover the cost of arranging and invoicing for social care. The only time we can charge is when we are arranging care for someone who pays the full cost themselves. Any fees must reflect the actual costs involved in arranging the care.

Many other local authorities already charge similar fees and introducing them in East Sussex would allow us to recover an estimated £219,000 a year.

We are proposing to introduce a set-up fee for arranging care for this group of people. The fee would be £118, which is lower than the national average of £325. The amount charged would be regularly reviewed to ensure that it was a fair reflection of the costs.

We have gone for a fixed amount because the cost of arranging care doesn’t change. To decide on the proposed amount, we recorded how much time the different teams spend on putting care in place.

The fee wouldn’t apply to people who only use technology-enabled support, but it would apply to all other types of care at home that people ask us to arrange.

It would apply to new requests to arrange care and to requests to make changes to existing care packages. If someone’s care changed because of a review of their needs by us they wouldn’t have to pay the fee.

If people did not want to pay the fee, they would have the option of arranging their own care instead.

We think that introducing this fee would allow us to recover an estimated £59,000 a year. This is based on 500 new people asking us to arrange their care each year.

Invoices tell people how much to pay for their care and when they must pay by. We are proposing to charge a fee for every invoice that we send to people in this group.

The charge per invoice would be £11. The cost per week to people would be lower than the national average of £6.45 a week (see below for East Sussex figures). The amount charged would be regularly reviewed to ensure that it was a fair reflection of the costs.

The fee covers the cost of staff time and banking charges. The amount paid over the year depends on the type of services people are receiving:

• People accessing only technology-enabled care are invoiced four times a year. Each invoice would cost £11, so the total for the year would be £44 (or 85p a week). 
• People accessing other care at home are invoiced every four weeks. Across the 52 weeks of the year, this works out as 13 invoices. Each invoice would cost £11, so the total for the year would be £143 (or £2.75 a week).

The invoice fee would apply to people we have already arranged care for, as well as new people who ask us to arrange their care. If people didn’t want to pay the fee, they would have the option of paying for their own care directly with the provider instead.

This charge would recover around £140,000 from people we have already arranged care for. We think too that there would be around 200 new people each year who would pay the fees and this would recover a further estimated £20,000.