Reforms will ‘bring NHS and social care closer together’

REFORMS to the NHS which sweep away much of the framework set in place under David Cameron will see the health service and partners work more closely, Health Secretary Matt Hancock has said.

The White Paper brings together the NHS, social care and local government to make decisions with the aim of providing integrated care.

The proposals see a tendering rule scrapped, which officials say has created unnecessary competition and made it difficult for councils and different parts of the NHS to set up joint teams and pool their budgets.

Under the changes, councils and NHS services will be able to set up bodies that can make decisions about how to join up their services. The shake-up will reverse reforms of the NHS in England introduced by former health secretary Andrew Lansley in 2012.

Mr Hancock said: “The practical implication is that these changes will allow the NHS to work more closely together with the different parts of the NHS and, crucially, with social care and public health colleagues.

“At the moment there are rules set out in law that stop some of that working together. We’ve seen that that’s been a problem.

“At the heart of these reforms is the idea you take the budget for the NHS in a local area, and you get an integrated team that has social care, the NHS, the GPs and the hospitals, and they commission and they do the work to spend the money as effectively as possible.”

Mr Hancock said the overhaul would reduce bureaucracy and “get funding and support closer to the front line”.

Mr Hancock has been criticised for introducing such reform at a time when NHS staff are exhausted from the Covid-19 pandemic. But he insisted the plan would aid the health service and had been developed with it.

“You’ve got to do both,” he told the BBC. “When we come out of this pandemic, and we will, we need to build a better, stronger NHS.”

Shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth said the proposed reforms may not lead to less privatisation. He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “There is no compulsory tendering of contract but contracts can still go out to the private sector and as far as we can tell, the contracts that have gone out, there’s no insistence that they should come back in.”

He added: “As far as I can tell so far, there’s nothing in these reforms about a long-term plan for social care, there’s nothing in these reforms which will give us a plan to bring waiting lists down... Those big waiting lists mean that many people are at risk of permanent disability [and] of losing their livelihood – we desperately need a plan to get those waiting lists down.”

The White Paper says reforms will be made to “help tackle obesity by introducing further restrictions on the advertising of high fat, salt and sugar foods; as well as a new power for ministers to alter certain food labelling requirements.” Sir Simon Stevens, chief executive of the NHS, said: “Our legislative proposals go with the grain of what patients and staff across the health service all want to see – more joined-up care, less legal bureaucracy and a sharper focus on prevention, inequality and social care.”