East Riding Director: Care System Must Change

Saturday, 24 January 2026 18:30

With unprecedented demand and falling funding, senior figures within East Riding Council say things have to change.

"Pushed to breaking point."

That's the verdict of a senior East Riding Council Director.

The authority's Director of Digital, Change and Technology is Andy Parkinson.

He says funding cuts and unprecedented demand means the council's care system must change to keep up:

"We've been in a great place, but we cannot ignore the challenges now that we're facing. Rising demand is just something that every councillor is wrestling with, but for us right now, we are seeing unprecedented rates of looked after children. That's probably the fastest rate that we've ever seen, and if you look at some of our older people that we're trying to look after and support, we're now 42% increase in the number of over 60 fives living alone, in the East Riding, in a 10-year period.

"That just gives you a sense of the scale of what we're trying to deal with. So this has pushed our kind of care model to breaking point the way that we look after adults and children, in particular, in East Riding, has to now got to be re-designed. It has to be re-shaped to respond to that level of demand."

Funding for special educational needs, in the region, is some of the lowest in the country and faces further cuts.

Here's Councillor Phillip Redshaw:

"Families in the East Riding know what it means to struggle for support. They already see services under pressure when we receive some of the lowest SEND funding in England and are then told to accept a cut.

"The message to those families is very stark. It is make do, [it] is not sustainable, it's not fair."

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