A new report claims that the UK's regional governments have failed to learn from each other's mistakes and successes when it comes to social care jobs, budgets and practices.

Governments in the UK have ignored each other's different approaches since devolution according to a new report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. It says that the Scottish, Irish, Welsh and English administrations will need to change their approach and learn from each over the next decade to make the most out of reduced public spending.

People in social care jobs in each of the four historic countries of the United Kingdom work under different policies. For example, Scotland offers free personal care for older people and the English social care policy places stronger emphasis on personalised treatment. 

However, the report claims that the Joint Ministerial Committee has never addressed social care during its meetings. The JMC, already criticised for its relatively few meetings, brings together representatives from each of the four nations. Government evaluations of social care policies largely focus on each nation separately, rather than on the interdependence between them.

The report says that though social care is a devolved service, it is part of a non-devolved 'secondary system' of social care support for older and disabled people on benefits and allowances. This means that transferring money currently spent on such aspects of policy to a national budget would have affects on the funding policies for the other three areas of the country as well. Such a proposal was included in the social care green paper, suggesting that attendance allowance money should be transferred to the English social care budget. However, the JRF report claims that this relationship was only 'weakly acknowledged'.

"Unprecedented" levels of public spending over the past decade has allowed the government to improve care services "without significant political cost" according to the report, that warns that this will not be possible in the near future thanks to the knock-on effects of the economic downturn. The report concludes that "the need to learn from each other, even if policies differ somewhat, will become much more acute in the next decade."