Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will urgently bring forward a White Paper on the future of provision and funding of social care integrated into the NHS in England.

We are determined to find a long-term solution to the challenges in social care to ensure that every person is treated with dignity and offered the security they deserve. We will seek to build cross-party consensus and will outline next steps shortly.

Integration across health and social care enables improved co-operation and joint decision-making between health and social care partners in delivering shared outcomes. The Government is already taking steps to integrate health and social care funding through the Better Care Fund (BCF), the national policy driving forward the integration of health and social care in England.

In 2019, 93% of local areas agreed that joint working had improved as a result of the BCF. The budgets reflect that cooperation: local areas have voluntarily pooled around £2 billion above the minimum required into the BCF last year.

In the recent Spending Round, we confirmed that the BCF and the improved BCF will continue in 2020-21. We are currently reviewing how the BCF can best support the closer integration of health and care and will provide local areas with further details about the BCF beyond 2020 as part of an announcement on the review.