Don’t wait for national social care reform to solve your financial problems; start now by understanding what you’re spending on prevention, what it achieves, and how preventative investment can help manage future demand and financial risk.

That’s the topic of this blog written by our Director, Laura Power-Wharton.

The national picture

It’s great to see that adult social care has moved sharply up the national political agenda over the summer. The new Prime Minister has accelerated the Casey Commission’s report to summer 2027 and launched a public “Big Conversation on Care”, alongside cross-party talks and a workforce pay reform strand.

Yet this national reset in ambition sits against a starkly deteriorating financial and operational picture on the ground.

ADASS’s Spring Survey 2026 found that councils overspent adult social care budgets by £715 million in 2025/26, with directors needing to find a further £909 million in savings for 2026/27. More than 400,000 people are waiting for assessments or care, while two-thirds of councils have seen providers exit the market in the past six months alone.

Local government finances remain under sustained strain. Many councils have needed Exceptional Financial Support simply to set a balanced budget, the latest Spending Review has not closed the deficit, and even a rebalanced funding formula is unlikely to relieve medium-term pressure.

Demand and costs are rising fastest in exactly the services councils cannot step back from – adult social care, children’s social care, and housing and homelessness.

For our council clients, this gap between long-term reform ambition and immediate fiscal reality is the central strategic risk. Without a sustained focus on financial sustainability now, authorities risk being unable to bridge to whatever settlement the Casey Commission ultimately delivers, alongside other fundamental reforms taking place across the system.

So, what can help?

Our five levers for financial sustainability

Through our recent work with London Councils and ongoing work with authorities across the country, we know that there is no single, objectively correct level of financial sustainability for all councils.

Strategic choices need to be made locally, which directly impact financial sustainability.

To support this, 31ten has developed an evidence-based five-lever framework to help councils articulate a sustainable range of services and make informed decisions that reflect local conditions and priorities, while aligning with expected future funding levels.

The five levers are:

1. Prevention – prioritising prevention over intervention
2. Assets – taking a strategic, data-driven approach
3. Markets and commercial – reshaping the relationship with markets and partners
4. Data and technology – enabling smarter prevention, greater automation and better decisions
5. Workforce – rethinking how people and their assets are best deployed

These levers provide a shared framework for considering difficult choices about services, investment and resources.

The framework in practice: Islington’s Budget Week

My colleague, Danielle Kirkwood, and I took this framework to London Borough of Islington’s Budget Week last month.

What resonated most was the shared language it creates. Finance and service teams, including adult social care, can compare options on the same terms. Trade-offs surface during the budget cycle rather than after it, meaning choices are explicit rather than accidental.

Of the five levers, prevention was the theme of the week, and it is where that clarity matters most.

Prevention: from aspiration to financial strategy

Like most local authorities and public sector organisations, Islington is grappling with how to move from funding prevention as a discretionary add-on to making it a primary lever for managing demand, protecting statutory duties and building the kind of sustainable, person-centred system that national reform is aiming towards.

The challenge is that prevention is often easier to support in principle than to demonstrate financially.

Across councils, we see a number of consistent challenges:

• Fragmented offers – preventative activity is often spread across different services and organisations.
• No shared definition – there is limited consistency about what counts as preventative activity.
• Limited understanding of current spend – councils do not always have a clear view of the totality of their investment in prevention.
• Limited understanding of the cost of doing nothing – it can be difficult to understand the impact of not funding existing preventative support.
• Limited local modelling – councils often lack the locally owned tools needed to build a robust evidence base for future investment decisions.

This makes it difficult to answer some fundamental questions, like:

What are we currently investing in prevention? What impact is that investment having? What demand is it preventing or delaying? And what could happen if we stopped investing?

Prevention is not an immediate saving

It is important to be realistic about what prevention can achieve.

From our work with Cambridgeshire, Haringey and Enfield councils, where we have seen effective preventative models, prevention is not treated as an abstract good or as a guaranteed route to immediate savings.

Instead, it is applied deliberately as a risk and demand management tool.

It works when it is:

• Embedded in practice and pathways, rather than delivered as a separate programme.
• Supported by strong governance and funding panels, so that decisions about investment are made collectively.
• Used to avoid or delay long-term costs, rather than layering additional services on top of existing provision.
• Recognised by Finance as risk reduction, rather than simply as service expansion.

Preventative investment may not reduce expenditure immediately. Its value can instead be in avoiding or delaying future demand, reducing the likelihood of more costly interventions and protecting the sustainability of statutory services.

The question for councils is therefore not simply ‘How much can we save?’, but instead ‘Where can we invest now to reduce future demand and financial risk?’

Where to start: build a local view of preventative spend

The first step is to create a local view of current investment in prevention.

Doing so increases transparency and accountability, improves communication about the impact of that investment and supports better, evidence-based decisions on the use of resources.

It also creates a stronger basis for making the case for increasing investment in prevention relative to reactionary and more traditional interventions.

A clearer understanding of preventative spend allows councils to start asking better questions:

• Where are we already investing in prevention?
• How much are we investing?
• What impact is that investment having?
• Which preventative interventions are helping to avoid or delay future demand?
• What are the risks of reducing existing investment?
• Where could additional investment deliver the greatest benefit?
• How should preventative investment be balanced against immediate financial pressures?

These are ultimately choices about the future shape and sustainability of local services.

Looking ahead

Getting the balance between short-term financial resilience and longer-term preventative investment right will define how well-positioned authorities are, both to weather current pressures and to shape their local offer for the longer-term.

The three-year funding settlement provides an opportunity to take that longer view and to phase investment towards the right balance for your area.

For councils facing sustained financial pressure, prevention should not be seen as an additional programme or an optional extra.

It should be considered as one of the strategic levers available to manage demand, reduce risk and build financial sustainability.

If you could benefit from our experience and an independent view on your budget-setting – please get in touch.