The financial position within the Health and Social Care Partnership (HSCP) remains extremely challenging.
Our budget outlook for the next three years highlights that we must take action to reduce costs. This outlook shows a significant funding gap of approximately £6m for Social Work/Social Care services and £12m for NHS services.
Evan Beswick, Chief Officer of Argyll and Bute Health and Social Care Partnership, said:
“As an HSCP we are legally required to provide a balanced budget to our Integration Joint Board (IJB) at its meeting in March 2026. We must deliver this while trying to minimise the potential negative impact that this could have on our core services, while also maximising the positive impact of the services we provide. Our budget is also dependent on the funds provided to us by our employing partners (Argyll and Bute Council and NHS Highland). We are working closely with them to reach a joint understanding of the pressures we are facing as an HSCP, the actions we can take to address those pressures and the impacts those actions will have on the people we serve and our financial position.
“One of the actions that we are currently exploring is to look at the services that we provide, both social work/social care and NHS, to identify where efficiencies and savings can be achieved to help us reduce our funding gap. We have been working with both partners on a range of savings proposals and a paper outlining a number of options from the social care/social work budget (pdf) will be presented to the next meeting of Argyll and Bute Council on 26 November. This ensures that social work/social care services are visible to members as they make decisions around how reducing resource is allocated across the full range of council services.
“It is also important to highlight that no decisions have yet been made on these potential savings options and if the paper is approved by Argyll and Bute Council on 26 November then it will go forward to the next meeting of the Integration Joint Board on 28 January. Members of the Board will then make a decision as to whether to take any or all of these proposals forward to the next stage which will be engagement with our communities.
“We understand that any proposals to change how HSCP services are delivered can be unsettling for the people who our services, our staff and the wider community. We want to reassure our local communities that we will continue to work and engage with them over the coming months to look at longer term service sustainability. This continues our refreshed programme of engagement which has covered recent policy change in social care and the next iteration of our Joint Strategic Plan. It is vital that we continue this programme through our budget setting process.”