Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what they are doing to encourage local agencies, both statutory and non-statutory, to provide more integrated local services.

This Government fully supports the provision of more integrated local services.

The Better Care Fund, for example, is enabling local areas to integrate and transform local health and social care services by 2020. Clinical Commissioning Groups and local authorities pool budgets and agree together how to focus funding to support more person-centred, coordinated care, so people can manage their own health and wellbeing and live independently in their communities for as long as possible, relieving the pressure on acute services. There are 150 Better Care Fund plans, covering each Health and Wellbeing Board area of England. In 2016-17, the Better Care Fund is funding 1,326 schemes across all local authorities with the largest focus for schemes being in developing integrated care solutions.

The Troubled Families Programme also encourages a different, more effective way for public services to work with families who place a disproportionate burden on them. By doing so, it helps to reduce demand and dependency of complex families on costly reactive public services and deliver better value for the taxpayer. This ‘service transformation’ in early help for complex families, which encourages the integration of local services, is an explicit aim of the programme. On 17th November, guidance for local authorities and their partners was published that sets out the key principles of, and ways to assess, service transformation in early help services for complex families.

There are also a number of public service reform related commitments in devolution deals, including around accelerating partnership working on the integration of health and social care; innovative employment trials; improving integration of employment support with other local services such as health; greater local influence over public protection including offender management and rehabilitation; and a range of other commitments to transformation and improvement in areas such as children’s services.