When examining this effect at an individual service level, the trend is largely still present, albeit less pronounced. However, for every service analysed, the variation in demand is shown to be less significant where newly formed unitaries have a population of 500,000 or more. Analysis of demand variation for each of adult social care, children’s social care, and SEND, below, demonstrates this. This illustrates the additional complexity introduced at a service level, as well as the potential risk of demand and resources not being matched across different funding streams of grants, earmarked funding, locally raised tax, and core funding allocation.
Whilst the trend of smaller unitaries seeing greater variation in demand is less clear for individual service areas, this analysis clearly demonstrates that individual scenarios where variation in demand for specific services is very significant, especially when smaller in size. This further highlights the risk to sustainability of newly formed authorities, both in terms of services being overwhelmed by high rates of demand, and, conversely, some services seeing much lower rates of demand and having excess, expensive, supply. The implication of this analysis is that disaggregation should be minimised, and where disaggregation is necessary, newly formed authorities should be kept at more significant scale. This should in turn be supported by accuracy in future funding allocations and formulas distributing social care grants, to match the variable demand profiles.
21%
12%
Average total demand variation in unitary councils below 300k
Average total demand variation in unitary councils above 500k
38
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