Hertfordshire County Council was inundated with over 33,000 requests for adult social care assistance in the last financial year – representing a 20% increase since pre-Covid levels.

The council's fourth quarter performance report was discussed at a meeting of the adult care, health and wellbeing cabinet panel.

The report stated there was a "notable increase in front door demand."

It added: "New requests for support rose to 33,641, marking a 2% increase from 2023-24 and a significant 20% rise from pre-Covid levels."

Despite the increase in demand, the report noted that first needs assessments were being carried out on time, with adults waiting an average of 12 days (down from 23 days in 2024) while carers waited 19 days (down from 27 days).

The document went on: "Needs assessments for adults also saw a 4% increase, totalling 13,864, while carers' needs assessments grew by 3% to 2,524. Over 27,000 adults are supported with services, and 15,210 of those adults are receiving long-term care, with the average cost of a long-term care package being £872."

Reports of safeguarding concerns reached 8,665 – down by 2% compared to the previous year – and of these, 30% progressed to an enquiry (2,780 cases).

In addition, Adult Social Care received 6,404 Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards (DoLS) applications, an increase of 509 from the previous year, representing an 8.6% rise.

Responding to the report, Cllr Rachel Carter asked officers about safeguarding concerns, adding: "On deprivation of liberty, obviously that's a lot of applications, could you give a bit of background to that?"

Alex Ogle, adult care services support manager, said: "As we get a safeguarding concern, as it's called now, that will come in through to our safeguarding team and they will triage that case. There's a sort of three-step process, you know, is there a concern, are they eligible?

"They tend to have to be eligible for support to take it forward. We can take it forward if there is a specific concern to an enquiry, but to get to an actual enquiry, they need to have that kind of eligibility threshold as well for us to deal with it in the council.

"The majority of safeguarding that we get is in the person's own home, about 50%, followed by residential and nursing homes. Most of that, from a wider council view – it's a little bit different for our mental health partner – is neglect and acts of omission, followed by physical abuse, followed by psychological abuse. I mention our mental health partner, because they have domestic abuse at the top."

Chair of the panel, Cllr Sally Symington, said: "I know it's easy to focus on the red issues and the ones that aren't going quite so well, for whatever reason, and to challenge them.

"But overall, we must remember that this has been an incredibly high-performing service.

"All credit to Chris [Badger, head of adult social care] and his team for delivering such an excellent set of figures, really across the board.

"That challenge is only really going to get greater with the financial constraints that we're facing as a council and the demand figures that we know and have discussed here."