Dr Daria Luchinskaya led on a report, A delicate balance?, with Wales Public Services 2025 colleagues Joe Ogle and Michael Trickey, analysing health and social care spending patterns in Wales over 2009-10 to 2015-16, and the issues that this raises for the future of public services financing and sustainability . This work builds on Daria's earlier contribution to the Institute of Fiscal Studies Green Budget (February, 2017), and provides the basis for further analysis of public services provision in Wales.

The main findings were that spending on NHS Wales has been growing as a proportion of all spending allocated to the Welsh government for day-to-day running of public services, which raises questions about the extent to which non-NHS public services, such as social care, can be financed. While day-to-day spending on local authority-organised adult social services has remained broadly flat in real terms in Wales, the increasing over-65 population in Wales means that spending per older person has fallen by over 12% in real terms over 2009-10 to 2015-16. Wales would need to be spending at least an additional £129 million by 2020-21 (at 2016-17 prices) to bring the per capita spend on local authority social services for over-65s back to 2009-10 levels. In the current austerity context, this raises questions about budgetary trade-offs and decisions about spending priorities. The authors will be exploring these issues in their next report.

In the next podcast about our work at the Institute for Employment Research, Bernard Casey talks about his research on older workers and the effects of working longer on health and well-being. Bernard also considers how employment, pensions and social cares systems interrelate, together with the effect of working longer on people’s physical and mental health.