News / MPs deliver stinging criticism of Better Care Fund

The Better Care Fund (BCF) is ‘little more than a complicated ruse’ to paper over funding pressures in adult social care, according to the Commons Public Accounts Committee.

In a report, the committee said integration must now be delivered through the sustainability and transformation plan process. 

Place-based planning will be critical to the success of health and social care, it added. 

The report said the BCF had failed to achieve any of its objectives – saving money, reducing emergency care admissions to hospital and lowering delayed transfers of care. Indeed, the committee said emergency admissions and delayed transfers had increased.

The report was one of several published at the end of April, just before Parliament was dissolved for the general election on 8 June. 

Another PAC report expressed continued concern over patient access to GPs, which varies between groups of patients and practices. 

Despite the target of recruiting 5,000 more GPs, the overall number fell in the last year and retention problems remain, the PAC said.

A further PAC report on ambulance services said there was significant variation in operational and financial performance in ambulance trusts.

Health concerns must be ‘front and centre’ of the UK negotiations with the remaining European Union members, and the Department of Health must put additional resources into preparing for the UK’s exit from the EU, the Commons Health Committee said. 

In a report on the Brexit process, MPs’ chief concern was the retention of the 60,000 people from the remaining 27 EU countries who work in the NHS, as well as the 90,000 who are providing social care.