Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether he plans to include (a) national commissioning standards for adult social care, (b) assurance and (c) oversight of adult social care commissioning in the National Care Service.

We have launched an independent commission into adult social care, chaired by Baroness Louise Casey. The commission will build a national consensus to create a National Care Service that is productive, preventative, and that gives people who draw on care, and their families and carers, more power in the system.

The commission's Terms of Reference are sufficiently broad enough to enable Baroness Casey to define its remit to independently consider how to build a social care system fit for the future, including the approach to commissioning, assurance, and oversight.

In the interim, we are making tangible improvements to lay the foundations for a National Care Service that will enable more people to live independently and make social care more productive. This includes driving ‘home first’ as the default option for receiving care. We have introduced a new Better Care Fund framework, for example, setting out that the National Health Service and local authorities should work together to set and meet goals, and we are backing care technologies by making it easier for everyone to identify and buy trusted solutions that help people live independently.

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has powers under the Health and Care Act 2022 to assess how well local authorities in England are performing against their duties under Part 1 of the Care Act 2014, including their duties relating to market shaping and commissioning. Formal assessments commenced in December 2023, and as of June 2025, the CQC has published over 40 local authority assessments. You can view their assessment of individual local authorities via published reports on the CQC’s website.