Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what evaluation has been undertaken to ensure that the £200 million National Transformation Fund for 2015–16 provided value for money.

For the new care models programme, vanguards were selected based on a transparent and rigorous process, which considered the full range of value that they could deliver for their patients and for the wider National Health Service.

New care model vanguards were required to submit ‘value propositions’ making the case for investment from the transformation fund. Money was only released once these were assessed, and approved.

National support was designed based on what the vanguards said they needed to support them to deliver, and included work with them to develop a robust monitoring and evaluation framework. The national support helped ensure that vanguards are well positioned for success, and checks that money has been spent as planned, quarterly in arrears.

An independent, multi-year evaluation will examine the longer-term impact of the new care models programme and its cost effectiveness.

Other transformation programmes (for example, the Diabetes Prevention Scheme or the Healthy New Towns programme), not directly connected with the new care models programme, each have their own evaluation work-streams based on similar principles to those being used in the new care models programme. The results from these evaluations are not yet available as the implementation of these programmes has just begun.