A woman approached us in the street recently and asked how she could get her severely autistic son into our organisation because she couldn’t cope any more. It was heartbreaking because we have a waiting list as long as your arm, but we can’t provide housing and services if we don’t have the resources.

Funding has been falling for our sector for at least a decade and looks set to get worse.

Local authorities fund social care through a combination of a grant from central government and local revenue-raising mechanisms – for example, council tax.

But long-running cuts to local authority budgets have meant funding means nearly one-third of requests for local government funding result in no support.

Michael Short of Happy Futures. Pic: RothRead photography

I work for Happy Futures in Scarborough, and we support individuals who live with learning disabilities, mental health and complex care needs. We already pay well compared to others in our industry but if we had more funding we could increase our employees’ wages even further.

Our sector is facing a recruitment crisis and maybe increased pay would attract more people to what is often a thankless job even if a highly skilled role.

If we had funding not only could we simply bring in more staff to help, we could give our current individuals even better lives and opportunities. We could improve their quality of life by allowing them to furnish their homes in the way they choose. If you think about your home, if you don’t like something you change it, and that makes you feel content. If you aren’t able to do this, you stop caring about where you live, may not want to be there and or even feel like you don’t belong.

If we had more funding, there is a wealth of technology we could utilise to support our individuals for example tablets that interpret eye movements and translates them into words which improves communication. We would be able to afford smart technology so they could control their own environments and be able to for example dim lights if they have specific sensory needs. This technology isn’t expensive and many of us already have smart speakers and listening devices in our homes, enabling more independence.

We could purchase more safety pods - specialist equipment designed that looks like a standard piece of furniture and allows a person with complex needs to sit in a calm space and de-escalate any challenging behaviour. These are one alternative to restraints which are sadly still widespread across the industry.

If we had more funding, we and other providers like us could purchase more specialist equipment.

We could also provide more vehicles for those who don’t have them. This would mean they could access their local and wider communities and experience different places, people and senses. They could go to the beach and smell fish and chips or go on holiday and take photos and make memories in the way that many of us just have this summer.

It is a human right to have freedom of movement yet many with complex needs do not have this even in this day and age.

Michael Short is positive behaviour support manager at Happy Futures.

Extra social care funding could transform quality of life: Michael Short