Hertfordshire County Council monitors its ‘steady’ performance amid ‘burgeoning’ care demands

Hertfordshire County Council is performing steadily amid “burgeoning” and “exponential” demand for its social care services, a meeting heard.

The council’s Performance Monitor report for the third quarter of 2023/2024 was recently discussed by the executive committee.

The report found the council is in a strong position with adult social care, marked at 17th place out of 152 local authorities according to National Social Care Benchmarking data.

But, the monitoring report stated: “The service continues to receive high numbers of new requests for support, averaging 2,577 per month and 19 per cent higher than pre-Covid.”

Some 23,400 new requests for support from adults were received in the nine months to December 2023, with a projected 31,200 by the end of 2023/24.

It added that during the quarter, there were 548 new admissions into residential and nursing care homes, 45 of whom were adults aged 18 to 64.

Among successes, 98 per cent of street lighting issues were rectified in a timely manner along with 97 per cent of category one roadworks.

Elsewhere, the report noted worsening risk levels for funding cuts to services and inability to deal with future demands.

It continues: “The financial risk is now very real and solutions need to be delivered to enable the council to publish a balanced budget for 2024/25.”

Cllr Bob Deering, portfolio holder for resources and development, called the ‘vast majority’ of performance evaluations ‘really good’ including urgent roadworks, whose ‘staggering’ performance is in the 90s percentage.

He added: “If you look at the statistics for children and also for adults, it becomes extremely vivid that we are on the receiving end of huge demand.

“The demand is just burgeoning, it’s exponential, and of course that in itself is very difficult to deal with in circumstances where, as always, if there were more money available from central government we’d love to have it.

“Finally, this report demonstrates again very clearly that we’ve turned a corner on agency spend, that is coming down. That’s an important statistic because it’s to do with workloads and availability of people to do the work.

“Of course, in principle agency workers are more expensive than staff members, so it’s good to see that coming down.”

Other executive members spoke of the report areas which related to their briefs.

Cllr Phil Bibby, portfolio holder for highways and transport, praised the 97.4 per cent success rate in fixing urgent category one roadworks, including potholes deeper than 5cm while Cllr Fiona Thomson, education portfolio holder, pointed out the number of children in care is half the national average.

Summing up, leader of the council, Cllr Richard Roberts stated: “I think the consistent theme here is that we’ve got 19 per cent higher referral rate into children’s services and yet we have fewer children in care and that’s testimony to some really high quality and difficult decision making.

“We know that we’ve got a 20% year on year increase at the moment very roughly in demands for educational and health care plans for children with special educational needs.”

He added more than 1,000 patients were discharged from Hertfordshire hospitals with the ‘number of those still in their homes three months later is as good as at any time in recent years’.