I work/have worked in various UK charities concerned with many of the same issues that social services departments work on (addiction, mental health, youth employability, offending/rehabilitation, social care).
@pjd is right. My answers would be a less restrained “hahahaha fuck no” and “tight and shrinking”.
Very quickly: the UK is a much more centralised state than the US. We have the UK government at Westminster, and also devolved governments for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The devolved governments have responsibility for social care budgets and policy; for England the Westminster government holds these powers. The devolved nations budget is determined in part by the central financial planning of Westminster, through a funding formula which effectively means that if England sees changes in its social services budget, these will be reflected in the size of the block grant made to devolved nations.
Actual delivery of social services (and many other government functions) is the responsibility of local authorities, who administer a city or county. Local authorities are funded in part through local taxes, but the majority of their budget is a direct grant from the relevant central government, either direct from Westminster or via devolved national government.
That last is the important point because that central budget has fallen enormously over the last ten years. The Conservative government’s austerity programme, starting from 2010, was an attempt to maintain the UK’s credit rating and keep deficits under control by massively reducing day to day government spending. As there are certain government budget lines that realistically can’t see much in the way of cuts (i.e. pensions and national healtlh) this means that the cuts fell disproportionately elsewhere. Figure 6 in here shows that local government (MHCLG) has seen a 60% cut in funding between 2010/11 and 2020/21. Relatedly, Justice has seen a 20% cut.
The upshot is pretty much what you’d expect. Services are stripped to the bone or non-existent. Centres have closed, workforces have shrunk. An increasing amount of what local authorities used to do in-house is being outsourced to the charity sector which while it might be good for my employment prospects means that there are now more fractured services with more opportunities for people to slip through the cracks.
Some local authorities have now got to the point where they cannot cope. Birmingham, one the UK’s largest cities, recently had to declare that it could not fund its annual expenditures and is now coming under central government control. A number of other large councils are very close to this point. As you’ll know, there’s a close relationship between social services and the justice system - ours is now a joke. It can take years for a case to come to trial, prisons are releasing criminals early because they are literally full. Probation services at strained to breaking point. This of course has knock on effects on social services, with traumatised victims denied justice, offenders not getting a full sentence or opportunities for rehabilitation.
In terms of your second question, very much yes and no. Yes, these services desperately need more warm bodies; staff retention is low and churn is high. But hiring and retaining people costs money, which isn’t available, so no there are not as many job vacancies being advertised as their should be.