FINANCIAL and workforce pressures will not be going away anytime soon, according to Caerphilly County Borough Council’s director of social services.

As part of his annual report, Dave Street revealed to a social services scrutiny committee meeting the current issues facing social care in Caerphilly County Borough.

At the meeting on Tuesday, November 22, Mr Street said: “These challenges are not going away, if anything they are getting harder.”

He added: “We are really struggling as far as domiciliary care provision is concerned.”

Domiciliary care is the range of council services to support people in their own homes.

Jo Williams, assistant director of adult services, also told the meeting that a lack of current staff meant that 95 people are waiting for care packages – the equivalent of 648 hours.

Ms Williams revealed that a “big company” which currently provides 850 hours of care is pulling its care provision from Caerphilly County Borough in December.

As a result 32 people from the unnamed company – including 30 “front line” carers and two office staff – have now moved over to the council’s social care team.

Ms Williams said the company was leaving Caerphilly because of viability concerns – it wanted to increase its hours of care, which the council was able to provide, but it was not able to recruit the staff to do so.

Ms Williams said the council had a positive response at its recruitment events, but added: “Usually [for] every person we get we lose another one to retirement.”

Gareth Jenkins, assistant director of children’s services, said recruitment was also an issue in child care, which is exasperated by the increase in referrals.

Additionally, Mr Jenkins said children’s needs had become more complex which was putting further pressure on resources.

But, he added: “What I will say is that Caerphilly has developed a good range of preventative services.”