Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what recent assessment he has made of the effect of changes to local authority social care budgets on the demand for health services.

There is a complex relationship between social care and National Health Service services.

Research indicates that for each additional £1 spent on care homes, hospital expenditure falls by 35p.

There is a twenty-fold difference between the best and the worst performing areas on delayed discharges of care. However, this is not linked to the levels of finance available to localities.

There has been an increase in delayed transfers of care over the past two years. This has resulted in pressure on the availability of hospital beds. However, that should be viewed in the context of the proportion of occupied beds capacity attributable to social care delays increasing by 0.8% between 2014/15 and 2016.

NHS England is working with the Department on a programme of work to identify a fuller understanding of the linkages between health and social care services.