Cornwall councillors have raised concerns about a rising demand for drug and alcohol treatment services while funding for services is being cut.

The council’s health and adult social care overview and scrutiny committee received a report on Wednesday about how demand for the services to help those affected by drug and alcohol abuse is on the increase.

However they also heard that funding for the service has not kept pace with the demand and was set to be lower in the council’s next budget plans.

Councillors heard that the drug and alcohol treatment services were seeing good success with those which it has been able to help but were warned that demand was outstripping resources.

Rachel Wigglesworth, director of public health in Cornwall, said: “We are very proud of our drug and alcohol treatment services in Cornwall, they are very good quality and we have very good accessibility to treatment.

“Prevention and the investment in intervention isn’t enough, it is never enough. We have had reductions in our core public health grant, that is our main funding stream.”

Rachel said that there was a need to look at the causes of drug and alcohol reliance and abuse “in the round” and said that there needed to be more work in areas such as “adverse childhood experiences”.

“The public health grant itself is under pressure and there is an uncertainty about its future. All of those services under that grant have been under pressure.”

Councillors heard that funding for public health had been cut since 2013 and was expected to continue to reduce.

Cornelius Olivier said that he believed that any cut in funding for public health was “the worst kind of false economy”.

He said that any cut in public health funding would be likely to increase the financial burden on other services such as the NHS.

The Labour councillor said he hoped that the scrutiny committee would “make the point strongly that we should not be doing this”.

Bert Biscoe said that there needed to be work done to ensure that funding could be provided to meet the demand for services.

However councillors had been warned that if funding was to be provided by the council then that money would have to be found from elsewhere in the council’s budget.

Cllr Biscoe said that this should be considered by all organisations which are linked with the drug and alcohol treatment services and said that the Cornwall Safety Partnership – which brings together multiple agencies – should be working to ensure that the funding is available.

He said: “There is an evidenced demand that needs to be met. What we should be saying is that we need to find more money.

“The director of public health has told us that there has been a systemic reduction in funding for public health. We need to stop that reduction of funding for public health.”

The committee voted unanimously to call for more funding to be made available for public health services and drug and alcohol treatment services in particular and for work to continue with the Cornwall Safety Partnership to seek the best way of funding services.

A further report is set to be brought to the committee when it meets in January to consider its final budget proposals.