Agenda item

The Board was presented with a report from the Strategic Director, Communities, which presented a suite of policies and procedures that made up the Service Closure Policy within the adult social care market.  These documents were attached to the report at Appendices 1, 2 and 3 and the appendices within them.

Members were reminded that from April 2015 the Care Act (the Act) required local authorities to help develop a social care market that delivered a wide range of sustainable high quality care and support services, and placed responsibility on local authorities to deliver a duty to ensure that needs were met, including when there was a planned or emergency disruption to services.  It was noted that in particular, the Act was explicit in the local authority’s responsibility to use market intelligence to have sound market oversight in order to develop a suitable local care and support market, foresee potential risks to disruption to services and undertake preventive action to avoid and/or minimise disruption in the event of a care service closure.

The report informed the Board that The Act introduced a new role for the Care Quality Commission (CQC) in overseeing the financial stability of the most hard to replace care providers (ie. providers who delivered across a number of geographical locations) and to ensure people’s care was not interrupted if any of these providers failed. It also described the responsibilities of a local authority if a local care provider failed.  The Act made it clear that local authorities had a temporary duty to ensure that the needs of people continued to be met if their care provider became unable to carry on providing care because of business failure, no matter what type of care they were receiving.  It was noted that local authorities had a responsibility towards all people receiving care regardless of whether they paid for their care themselves, the local authority paid or whether it was funded in any other way.

Officers advised that in line with the new requirements on the local authority, three policies and procedures that made up the ‘Service Closure Policies’ as referred to above, had been developed:

1)    An overarching policy in relation to market oversight;

2)    A policy and procedure for responding to a planned service closure; and

3)    A policy and procedure for responding to an unplanned service closure.

RESOLVED:  That the Board notes the contents of the policies and procedures attached within Appendices 1, 2 and 3 of the report.