Recommendation 23

The Department explained that it had chosen a new payments system because it would be making payments on a scale not dealt with before and had wanted a proper way 47 Q 47 48 Department Health and Social Care, People at the Heart of Care: Adult Social Care Reform White Paper, December 2021, white paper, CP 560 49 RSE0023 50 RSE0024 51 Q 49 52 RSE0003 53 RSE0007 54 Qq 49, 50 55 Q 64; C&AG’s Report, Figure 7 56 Qq 64–70 57 Q 65; C&AG’s Report, paras 15, 3.11, Figure 7 Reforming adult social care in England 17 to guard against fraud risk, and assess and process requests that came in.58 We challenged the Department on why it had not simply routed payments through local authorities, given they have good existing connections to providers. The Department told us that not all providers had relationships with local authorities which, it said, had been a problem during the pandemic for getting money directly to providers. It assured us that the business case would have looked at all the different options and that having a direct route to providers had “an efficiency to it” and would provide an option to do that in future, should it be needed.59 In written evidence provided after the session the Department confirmed that it had selected a new digital platform by the NHS Business Services Authority as the preferred option in part because local authorities did not have direct relationships with all care providers in their areas. Other reasons cited were to avoid the potential for inconsistencies in approach to training and distribution of funding, and to make it easier to collect data on the value for money of the training.60