Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what guidance his Department issues to local authorities to on conducting consultations with recognised care provider associations when setting adult social care fee rates.

The Care Act 2014 places a statutory duty on local authorities, under Section 5, to promote a sustainable and high-quality adult social care market. This includes ensuring that care providers can operate effectively and that fee structures support the delivery of high-quality services. While the Care Act does not prescribe specific methods of engagement, such as recognised provider associations, it sets the overarching requirement for local authorities to understand local market conditions and the costs of care. In practice, this means local authorities are expected to draw on appropriate evidence, which may include information from providers, when setting fees.

On 18 December 2025, the Department published its new annual local authority priority-setting document. This sets out a list of priority outcomes and expectations for local authorities in 2026/27, and one of these is for local authorities to “set fee rates at a sustainable level, in line with commissioning priorities, to help shape markets and enable adult social care providers to recruit a skilled workforce and stabilise and improvement workforce capacity, and in preparation for employment rights reforms, starting from financial year 2026 and the fair pair agreement starting in financial year 2028”.