Care for UK’s most vulnerable faces ‘collapse’ as providers count cost

A social care insider said: ‘If you do not fund the system properly it collapses, and this is what we are seeing now.’ Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

For several years now, as austerity sucked billions out of social care, the highly specialised UK social care system for adults with complex physical disability, learning disability and autism has been quietly held together by the benevolence of charities.

Charities and not-for-profit firms have poured millions of pounds of reserves into propping up the supposedly taxpayer-funded services they provide under contract to councils and the NHS. That subsidy seemed sustainable when inflation was low and subbing underfunded public services did not put the charity’s own survival at risk.