The ‘extreme pressure' on social care is now ‘turning into an avalanche and it's going to bury the NHS,' Lib Dem leader Ed Davey has told the Local Government Association's annual conference.

In his speech on the last day of the conference, Sir Ed said the social care system was ‘not fit for purpose' due to the ‘multi-billion-pound black hole in local authority budgets'.

He also said the recruitment and retention issue in adult social care, which has 165,000 vacancies in England, is one of the main issues facing the care system.

Reiterating the Lib Dem call for a new carers' minimum wage, which would be £2 an hour above the national minimum wage, Sir Ed said social care was ‘not a job we can outsource to ChatGPT'.

The Lib Dem leader emphasised the link between the social care crisis and the problems faced by the NHS, adding: ‘You can't fix the NHS without fixing social care and you can't fix social care without local government.'

A new analysis published by the party has revealed that the number of hospital beds affected by delayed discharge due to a lack of social care capacity has risen by around a third in one year.

The analysis found that for the week beginning May 21 more than 128,000 hospital bed days were lost to delayed discharges - up from 97,000 in the same week last year.

Sir Ed said: ‘The crisis in social care means that only two in five people are able to leave hospital when they are ready to do so.

‘This puts even more pressure on already overstretched hospitals.

'It's all connected and it's all causing so much pain and distress and that's why we need to fix social care.'