Home and Community Care Ireland has asked its government for £85 million to expand support hours, fund carer mileage, and close a disability care gap.

HCCI’s €100m Budget Puts a Price on a Crisis UK Domiciliary Care Knows Well

Home and Community Care Ireland wants €100 million (£85 million) from Budget 2027, and the way it has broken that figure down is more instructive than the total itself. 

Two million additional hours of home support. Thirty million euros specifically to fund carer travel, a cost the organisation says the Health Service Executive (HSE) currently does not cover at all. A new national scheme for disability home support, built to sit alongside the existing system for older people rather than leave it competing for the same pot. 

None of it will register in Whitehall. But each element maps onto a cost the UK sector has spent years absorbing quietly rather than pricing openly, and that contrast is worth sitting with.

Home and Community Care Ireland (HCCI) represents 46 private home care companies employing more than 15,000 carers, and its submission lands against a backdrop familiar to anyone commissioning domiciliary care anywhere in these islands: around 5,600 older people were waiting for home support at the end of last year, with sharp regional variation between areas carrying long backlogs and others with little delay at all. Demand is expected to grow by up to 91 per cent by 2040.

The Travel Cost Nobody Wants To Own

HCCI’s most pointed figure is not the headline €100 million. It is the claim that 77 per cent of its members have seen staff cut their hours or leave the sector entirely because of unfunded travel costs between clients. That number describes a mechanism, not just a symptom, carers absorbing fuel and time costs that commissioning rates were never built to cover, until the arithmetic of the job stops working for them individually, one resignation at a time.

UK domiciliary providers know this bind without needing the Irish framing. What’s shifted the ground slightly is the emergence of technology positioned as a partial answer to exactly this kind of visibility gap. A passive, whole-home monitoring system launched by Ontario-based Cognitive Systems, using WiFi-based motion sensors rather than cameras or wearables, was pitched explicitly around agencies needing more insight with less contact time and fewer resources, precisely the condition HCCI’s mileage figures describe from the funding side rather than the technology side. The tools exist to make thinly stretched visits go further. They do not resolve the underlying question of who pays for a carer to get from one client’s door to the next.

The Money Hidden Outside The Care Budget

The disability home support gap HCCI describes, a national scheme for older people but nothing equivalent for working-age disabled adults, has a close structural cousin in how unpaid care gets costed in the UK. Ministers here recently opened a consultation on paid carer’s leave and a protected right to return to work after intensive caring periods, prompted by a Treasury-focused figure: an estimated £37 billion a year attributable to carers leaving or reducing paid employment because the system offers them nowhere else to turn. 

Carers UK put the number of unpaid carers juggling paid work at 2.8 million people, a workforce the formal social care system depends on as a buffer it does not fund, train, or plan around.

HCCI’s warning about a two-tier system, entitlement depending on which cohort a person falls into rather than what they actually need, describes the same failure mode from a different angle. Split funding streams by category rather than by need, and the gaps between categories become someone’s unpaid, uncounted labour. Ireland is naming that gap for disability services. The UK has been naming it, more slowly, for unpaid carers generally.

Training Is The Other Line Item Nobody Budgets Properly

HCCI’s submission tacks on a request to examine how technology and artificial intelligence might support care delivery, almost as an afterthought behind the funding asks. UK evidence suggests that afterthought deserves to be moved higher up the list. 

A national audit commissioned by Alzheimer’s Society, covering 53 providers and 119 training packages, found that only 38 per cent of social care staff have completed dementia-specific training, despite roughly 70 per cent of care home residents already living with diagnosed or undiagnosed dementia. More than half the training that does exist sits at basic awareness level only.

That matters directly to any funding submission built around expanding hours of home support, because more hours delivered by an undertrained workforce does not automatically mean better outcomes. It means more contact time in which gaps in preparation become more consequential, not less.

A Devolved Precedent Worth Watching

There is a domestic comparison closer to home than Dublin, too. Wales’s new administration recently committed £145 million in NHS funding explicitly targeted at waiting times and workforce, alongside a graduate employment summit designed to stop newly qualified nursing, midwifery, and paramedic staff falling out of the pipeline before they enter it. The parallel to HCCI’s submission is structural rather than sectoral: both are attempts to name workforce retention as a funding problem in its own right, rather than an assumed side effect of capital spending elsewhere.

Whether either government follows through at the scale requested is a separate question from whether the diagnosis is correct.

What This Means Beyond Budget 2027

HCCI’s submission will be judged in Dublin on its own political terms, and Irish fiscal politics will decide what survives contact with Budget 2027. But UK commissioners, ICB leads, and care technology suppliers reading it from across the water should recognise the shape of the argument even where the institutions differ. Travel costs, unpaid care, and training gaps are not accidents of any single system’s design. They recur wherever home-based care depends on funding streams built around visits and hours rather than the full cost of delivering care safely and consistently. Ireland has chosen to put a number on that cost. The UK sector is still largely absorbing it in silence.