Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if she will make an assessment of the potential merits of requiring local authorities to use the same model for the commissioning of social care services.

Under the Care Act, local authorities are tasked with the duty to shape their care market to ensure a diverse range of high-quality person-centred care and ensure that support services are provided to meet the needs of the local population. We recognise that this is challenging, and the Government intends to develop a set of national commissioning standards, to set clear expectations of what good commissioning looks like and to drive greater consistency across the country. We are also investing in a new training offer for senior commissioners, to enhance strategic leadership capability and ensure they have the skills they need to shape their markets well.

We recently published the Market Sustainability Insights Report, which summaries some of the approaches local authorities in England are taking to building sustainable and innovative care markets. It is designed to be a supportive tool for local authority commissioners and it is available at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/local-authority-market-sustainability-plans-insights-report