Issue - meetings

The Strategic Director for Social Care and Education submits a report on the Health and Care reforms.

Members of the Commission are recommended to note the report and pass any comments to the Strategic Director for Social Care and Education.

The Strategic Director for Social Care and Education submitted a report on the Health and Care reforms. Members of the Adult Social Care Scrutiny Commission were recommended to note the report and pass any comments to the Strategic Director for Social Care and Education.

Councillor Russell, Deputy City Mayor for Social Care and Anti-Poverty, introduced the report. She highlighted the raft of expectancies of local authorities by government and that they were placing huge additional administrative burdens, where the preparation for inspections was huge, against a backdrop across the country of struggling capacity and funding. Additionally, it was not known if the new prime minister would retain the National Insurance precept, therefore a lot of work was having to be done at risk.

The Deputy City Mayor wanted people to be aware of the scale of work that was being accepted and what that meant for team who were doing an incredible job. She was also grateful for the work that the Strategic Director for Social Care and Education was undertaking nationally with ADASS to help understand what the national picture was to ensure the Council did not fall down pitfalls that other authorities had.

Martin Samuels, Strategic Director for Social Care and Education informed the meeting that the health and social care system was going through the biggest period of change in a decade. The Health and Social Care Act 2012 was being replaced, and a number of Care Act 2014 elements that had not yet been implemented were now supposed to be being implemented, sometimes in amended form. There was a raft of White Papers, legislation, guidance and reports, the links for which were included in the report.

The Strategic Director for Social Care and Education noted that Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) had ceased to exist at the end of June 2022 and had been replaced with Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) which in Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland (LLR) would operate on the same footprint as the combined CCGs had been working at for the past few years, therefore there were no particular differences, which was fortunate compared to other parts of the country where some ICBs’ footprint bears little relationship to local authority footprints, and some authorities were split between two ICBs, or there was just the one ICB for a very large area, such as Greater Manchester.

Members were informed that all ICBs were now required to have a level of representation from the local authorities in their area. The Strategic Director for Social Care and Education was now the city council’s official representative on the ICB for LLR. In addition, the Assistant City Mayor for Health, as the Chair of the Health and Wellbeing Board, had been invited to attend the ICB meetings. Unlike the position with CCGs, the NHS trusts were also members of the ICB Board which was a deliberate change from the previous structure. This change was an important one, as it eliminated the Commissioner / Provider split which has operated in the  ...  view the full minutes text for item 7