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Adult social care reform white paper – it’s all about the delivery.

Jeremy Cooper

People at the Heart of Care: Adult Social Care Reform white paper, was published yesterday. It contains 35 references to pots of money in the social care white paper. This is significant. Not because of the detail or the money itself, but because of the change it signals in HOW we will deliver change.

As this is the latest in a long line of social care white papers, it immediately faced the obvious question : What will be different this time?

Commenting on the topic, Richard Humphries describes how “The modern history of adult social care is littered with the carcases of long-forgotten white papers.” 

Despite the sceptics, I argue that the big change this time is the DELIVERY.

Our analysis has found that driving change in local public service systems that the effort needed is on average 10% working out the right thing to do and 90% delivering.

So, rather than ask whether the 10 year vision for social care is spot on or ambitious enough, the bigger question is how close will we get to it? How will we deliver it?

The white paper points to a new answer on this – in particular a new balance of collaboration between central and local government. As well as the step change in collection and aggregation of data and the significant step up in oversight by CQC, this is best shown by all of the individual pots of money (list shown below).

That could mean that success lies in getting much better at bidding for funding. Or it could show that Whitehall cares about how change is delivered. It implicitly recognises that there isn’t enough money overall, so attempts to change may get overwhelmed by daily financial pressures. It could point to the need for true collaboration right across the sector, with each area pioneering and learning from others.

Now it’s all about the delivery!

Summary of the pots of money.

There are 35 references to these through the document. Some overlap. Most are new money, but not all. Some are increases to current pots. They refer to different periods from 1 to 4 years, mostly the next 3.

  • £300m to integrate housing into health and care
  • £150m to drive the adoption of technology
  • £500m for workforce
  • £25m to support unpaid carers
  • £30m for innovative care models
  • £5m for pilots to help with the understanding and access to care and support
  • £70m for commissioning improvement
  • £210m Care and Support for Specialised Housing (CASSH)
  • £570m Disabled Facilities Grant (DFG)
  • £1m centre for assistance and accessible technology.
  • £3.6bn for the cap on care costs and fair cost for care
  • £5.4bn health and care levy

This step-change is exciting for us at IMPOWER because we’re not your average public sector consultancy. We love to solve complex social problems by co-producing programmes with our public sector partners. Working in partnership our passionate and skilled team use EDGEWORK© and behavioural science to deliver long term, sustainable change. We believe better outcomes really do cost less.

Written by

Jeremy Cooper

Director, IMPOWER

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