There are more than 2,300 care home vacancies across Merseyside amid warnings that other homes across the region will be forced to shut if the situation continues to deteriorate.
Martin Farran, Liverpool Council's director of adult services and health, told a select committee meeting last night that multiple homes across the city were facing serious challenges in getting their occupancy rates high enough to survive in the long term.
It comes in the week that another city care home revealed it would close and shortly after the council negotiated to keep two other homes, which had been due to shut at the end of this month, open until spring.
Council figures show that occupancy rates in Liverpool plummeted from a 94% average to an average of 83% during the pandemic. Care homes were badly hit by outbreaks during the first wave of the pandemic and many have seen vacancies continue to rise since then.
Mr Farran said: "The current level of vacancies overall is at 591 vacancies in Liverpool and across the five Merseyside authorities we've got somewhere just over 2,300 so you can get the scale of the challenge we've got.
"It's not as significant in Cheshire but overall across the North West it is quite high."
He said issues also varied widely across the city, with some homes in a significantly worse situation than others. Mr Farran said Millvina and Brushwood, the two council-built care homes run by Shaw Healthcare which are still threatened with closure in the spring, are two examples.
He said: "The issue is that the average masks the fact that we have a number of providers with lower levels of occupancy, which included Millvina and Brushwood.
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"We have about ten care homes out of 87 which have below 70% occupancy so, again as has been said, if it's around 85% to 95% that is the level to break even."
Mr Farran said that homes are able to cut back on costs in the short term but that the current levels of occupancy for many homes was not a sustainable position in the medium to long term.
The crisis in adult social care funding has been growing for a number of years and the Conservative government have promised to reform the system.
However, no reform has yet been passed and the pandemic has put significant strain on social care providers across the country.
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