New ADASS head warns of ‘tough year’

Social care leaders face a “tough year to come” with continued funding battles and the need to develop different ways of working, the new ADASS president has warned.

Richard Jones takes over from Essex CC executive director for adults, health and community wellbeing Jenny Owen as president of the association of Association of Directors of Adult Social Services (ADASS).

Mr Jones, currently Lancashire’s executive director of adult and community services, said the next 12 months would see directors tasked with keeping up the momentum for a sustainable care and support system with the new government, as well as dealing with a wider reform agenda.

He said the continued drive for personalisation of social care, coupled with the predicted further funding pressures, would call for a “the development of a new paradigm for leadership of place”.

Mr Jones said he expected councils to increasingly look to include voluntary groups in their approach to catering for local social-care needs, as well as looking at public sector integration on a wider level than just Primary Care Trust and council joint working.

“Integration for me is about an approach which seeks to align systems to a common aim,” he said.

“Government can help by being tight on outcomes and ensuring there are integrated performance measures while allowing local places to develop their own solutions.

“You can’t mandate integration from a national level and we need to move to a better rebalancing of influence and shared leadership between the centre and what is done locally. “Equally, we need to rebalance what is done by public sector agencies and what is developed and commissioned from voluntary and community sector resources.”

Mr Jones told the ADASS spring seminar in Brighton that he was “proud and privileged” to have been elected to serve as president in 2010-11.

He also paid tribute to immediate past Jenny Owen for her leadership during the previous 12 months.

Born in Macclesfield, Mr Jones took up his first social care job in Kent, before qualifying as a social worker and taking up a post in Bolton.

His first director job was at St Helens MBC, and he worked for the Social Services Inspectorate in the north west before being appointed director in Lancashire in 2003.