“Innovative” care fund branded shambles in wake of audit report

The National Audit Office (NAO) said a fundamental failure to plan properly in Whitehall had seriously undermined the otherwise “innovative” Better Care Fund leaving local bodies facing a race against time to implement their shake-ups.

The £3.8 billion Better Care Fund is aimed at helping councils and the NHS work better together in areas such as care for the elderly to reduce unnecessary hospital admissions.

Margaret Hodge, chairman of the Public Accounts Committee said the report showed planning for the Better Care Fund has been a “shambles”.

“Successful delivery depends on goodwill and joint commitment but delays and changes to the Fund’s design have weakened its credibility with local bodies and lost goodwill.

“The Better Care Fund is a complex and challenging initiative that clearly requires strong leadership and effective cross-government working, both of which have been lacking.

“It is hard to believe that until recently there was no central management team or programme director and there were only limited attempts to identify and manage risks to successful delivery.

“Such incompetence from Departments is unacceptable at a time when the number of people most likely to need care is rising, and overall funding is falling.

“We will robustly question officials on plans for the Fund when they appear before us in December.”

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt says the project will allow hospitals to “focus on treating the patients who really need to be there”, cutting delayed discharges by 101,000 a year, stays in accident and emergency by 163,000 and allowing 2,000 more elderly people to stay in their own homes.

But the hoped-for savings have been massively downgraded since the outset and the NAO cautioned that the revised benefits “may still be overoptimistic” and are based on “optimism”.

A Government spokesman said: “Local areas’ plans show how they will transform services to cut around 160,000 emergency admissions just next year and help people get home from hospital more quickly when they do have to be admitted.

“This is the most ambitious plan to transform care ever undertaken and we ensured detailed work took place a year ahead of the launch to allow us time to iron out the issues that the NAO itself now acknowledges have been addressed.”