Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether his Department has made an assessment of the potential merits of setting a standard hourly agency rate across social care.

Local authorities are responsible for determining the fee rates paid to providers. The Care Act 2014 states local authorities should have evidence that fee levels are appropriate to provide the agreed quality of care and also enable providers to effectively support care users and invest in staff development, innovation and improvement. We are committing £1.4 billion to support local authorities to move towards paying providers a fair cost of care.

As a condition of receiving funding, local authorities will be required to conduct thorough, evidence-based cost of care exercises, set out their plans for driving market sustainability, including progress towards a fair cost of care and report to the Department on how funding is used.