Care England Fee Support 2023/24

The LGA has been clear with Care England that the best course of action providers should take to fee negotiations is through engagement with their local authorities. Although local authorities are typically the instigators of such engagement, the LGA has suggested that providers should be proactive in initiating conversation where an authority has not done so.

Care England wants to offer support to help navigate a path forward and create a process of engagement both locally and nationally to help reach a joint understanding of the financial constraints facing sector partners.

Therefore, to help providers facilitate this conversation, Care England has drafted the template letter below that can be sent to your local Adult Social Care Director to initiate engagement between yourself and your commissioners.

Please send these letters as soon as possible. The LGA has confirmed that the Director’s contact details should be published on all local authority websites. If you are invited to a provider group engagement session, please forward the details to Care England, who will attend to support members accordingly.

You can access a template letter on the Care England here. If you have any questions, please contact the Care England team.

Dear [insert name],

We are contacting you today to ascertain the adult social care provider engagement process you have in place before taking any 2023-24 care fee uplift decisions to your cabinet meetings or the council decision process for approval.

As we all know only too well, the rising cost of living, record inflation, the energy crisis, winter pressures and changes to the timeline for the adult social care reforms have all impacted the sustainability of the adult social care market.

To ensure that 2023-24 care fees accommodate the costs of running an efficient service and caring for individuals, we would like to work with you in a proactive and understanding manner to reach a common understanding of the pressures challenging the sector’s financial sustainability.
To achieve a fair and sufficient basis, an authority and its local providers should engage in fair and adequate conversations to ensure the long-term effectiveness of adult social care. Engagement enables both parties to provide supporting evidence that helps demonstrate ongoing concerns regarding current and future pressures.

If you could please respond to this letter with an outline of your 2023-24 fee review and negotiation process, stating how we can engage with you prior to decisions being made and stating what we can do to support the council in advance of the final decision, it would be appreciated.

We would be very happy for our local and national care associations to support the engagement and attend any group meetings held by the council to ensure wider views can be taken into consideration.