Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, what estimate he has made of the size of the funding gap by 2020 in (a) adult and (b) children's social care; what the effect of that gap will be on the provision of that funding; and what steps he is taking to reduce the scale of that gap.

The Government periodically assesses resourcing requirements for local government as part of each Spending Review. In addition to the package announced at the 2015 Spending Review and the 2017-18 local Government Finance Settlement, the 2017 Spring Budget provided £2 billion of new funding to support social care. As a result of measures introduced by the Government since 2015, councils had access of up to £9.25 billion more dedicated funding for social care in the 3 years to 2019-20.