Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, if he will undertake a full public consultation prior to approving the establishment of any Accountable Care Organisations.

NHS England recently published a draft Accountable Care Organisation (ACO) contract. This contract is a variant of the NHS Standard Contract and is designed to assist local commissioners to commission an integrated package of primary medical services and other health (and possibly social care) services for a defined population from a single lead provider referred to as an Accountable Care Organisation. An ACO is “established” only by the award of such a contract.

Any decision as to whether to award a single ACO contract is one for local commissioners.

There is no obligation on the Secretary of State to conduct a full public consultation on the introduction of accountable care models or the commissioning of ACOs.

NHS England intends to permit a small number of clinical commissioning groups, under its oversight, to use locally developed versions of its draft ACO contract to commission ACOs for their populations. The learning from this will inform any future development of the draft ACO contract. NHS England has committed to consulting on the draft ACO contract before any decision is made to issue it as a contract for wider use in the National Health Service, in accordance with its duties under regulation 18 of its Standing Rules (SI 2012/2996). The consultation conducted by NHS England under regulation 18 will offer an opportunity for scrutiny of the proposed ACO contract before it is published for general use.

To enable the draft contract to be tested NHS England has requested the Secretary of State to make amendments to a number of regulations. The Department has consulted publicly on those changes to regulations. This consultation closed on 3 November. We are currently considering the responses and whether any further regulatory changes may be needed. The Government will formally respond in due course.

It will always be for local commissioners to determine how to best deliver services to meet local needs. It is right that decisions on local services and service models are made by local commissioners, who can best assess how to meet the needs of people in their area. For any significant system reconfiguration, we expect all local parts of the system to be talking to the public and stakeholders regularly — it is vital that people can shape the future of their local services.