In April 2014 the 151 Health and Wellbeing Boards submitted plans setting out how they would spend the Better Care Fund from April 2015 to drive integration of health and social care services, improve the quality of healthcare and social care, and save money. However, the quality of early preparation and planning has not matched the scale of ambition. The Better Care Fund aims to deliver better, more joined-up local services to older and disabled people to care for them in the community, keep them out of hospital and avoid long hospital stays. However, early local plans for the Fund, which will pool £5.3 billion of existing NHS and local authority funding in 2015-16, did not meet Ministers’ expectations or generate the level of savings the Government expected and all plans had to be resubmitted. Although the Government’s early planning assumption was that the Fund would save the NHS £1 billion in 2015-16, current plans forecast at least £314 million of savings for the NHS. The Better Care Fund will run from April 2015. The Department of Health and the Department for Communities and Local Government have developed the Fund’s policy, with NHS England and the Local Government Association responsible for the delivery and implementation of the Fund.
This inquiry will allow the Committee to assess and comment at the planning stage on the risks to successful integration of services, value for money and the impact on patients. It will also explore how accountability for the local use of the Fund will operate.