MPs have criticised ‘flawed’ Government attempts to pool health and care funding, amid concerns over the level of savings that can be delivered by local areas.
A report on the £5.3bn Better Care Fund from the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) today warned a failure to be clear with local areas over savings projections had ‘severely undermined’ initial planning for the scheme.
PAC chair Margaret Hodge said: ‘While NHS England and the Department of Health worked on a planning assumption that the Fund would secure £1bn in financial savings for the NHS, the Department for Communities and Local Government had not worked on the basis of a required savings target.’
She added that local plans indicated savings of just £55m would be delivered instead of £1bn.
A redesign of the Fund in April 2014 saw priorities change from improving local services through integration to protecting NHS resources. Hodge said concerns had been raised that the switch ‘moved the integration agenda backwards and not forwards’ and put local areas ‘at greater risk of not being able to implement the policy’.
‘It is not yet clear how all local authorities will protect adult social care services to the extent intended. At the time of the hearing, 14 local plans presented serious concerns with regard to the protection of adult social care in those areas,’ she added.
Responding to the report, chair of the Communities and Local Government Committee, Clive Betts said: ‘Given the fund is supposed to be about integration and joined-up working, the lack of communication between central government departments is deeply troubling.
He added that the way in which government had treated accounting on the Fund had also been a cause for concern.
‘During meetings of my committee, this has emerged as a clear case of Government double counting. Better Care Fund money is included within both the NHS budget and local authorities’ spending power. The Government is spending the same money twice in a desperate effort to mask reductions in local authority spending while seeking to show that it is maintaining NHS funding in line with inflation.’
A spokesman for the Department of Health said the Fund would 'help more people to stay at home with dignity and independence’ and ‘has the potential to cut around 160,000 emergency admissions and get people home from hospital more quickly when they do have to be admitted.’
