Agenda item

The Democratic Services Officer advised that in advance of the publication of statutory guidance on the Secretary of State’s new powers in relation to health service reconfigurations, the Department of Health & Social Care (DHSC) had published a document entitled ‘Health overview and scrutiny committee principles’, published on 29 July 2022.

The document set out the expectations of the DHSC, the Local Government Association (LGA) and the Centre for Governance and Scrutiny (CfGS) on how integrated care boards (ICBs), integrated care partnerships (ICPs) and local authority health overview and scrutiny committee (HOSC) arrangements would work together in the future to ensure that the new statutory system-level bodies were locally accountable to their communities.

The guidance detailed 5 principles, which set out best practice ways of working between HOSCs, ICBs, ICPs and other local system partners to ensure the benefits of scrutiny were realised. It was advised that these principles should form the basis of ongoing discussions between the aforementioned partners about how they would work together in the future.

The 5 principles were:

· outcome focused

· balanced

· inclusive

· collaborative

· evidence informed

The guidance emphasised that Health scrutiny had a strategic role in taking an overview of how well integration of health, public health and social care was working and in making recommendations on how it could be improved locally.

In addition the role of Joint HOSCs was particularly important in assessing strategic issues that covered 2 or more local authority areas, and would become even more important under the new arrangements, as ICB areas spanned more than one local authority area in most cases. In particular, JHOSCs would have a strategic role to play in scrutinising the delivery and outcomes against the joint 5 year-year forward plan and the integrated care strategy.

In terms of next steps Members were reminded that the Health and Care Act 2022 introduced a power for the Secretary of State to call in and take decision on or connected to reconfiguration proposals at any stage in the proposal’s process. To support this intervention power, the local authority referral power, which was set out in regulations, would be amended to reflect the new process. The DHSC would also issue statutory guidance on the new powers outlining how the Secretary of State proposed to exercise their functions, including the new Secretary of State call in power. It was noted that the new statutory guidance would also include information for NHS commissioning bodies, NHS trusts and NHS foundation trusts about how they should be exercising their functions under the new reconfigurations process.

It was advised that exact timelines in respect of the publication of new statutory guidelines was yet to be determined; however, any changes to the reconfiguration process introduced through the Health and Care Act 2022 would not be implemented immediately. It was therefore anticipated that the local authority’s power of referral would remain in place until July 2023.

Members of the Panel expressed the view that it was disappointed that despite the efforts of numerous national bodies to retain the local authority referral power for HOSC’s the introduction of the Health and Social Care Act 2022 meant this power would no longer be in place. It was acknowledged that the Local Government Association (LGA) and Centre for Governance and Scrutiny (CfGS) continued to press for the introduction of process by which a local authority could proactively request that the Secretary of State use her call-in power to examine reconfiguration proposals.     

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