News

The Department of Health is considering plans for regional commissioning of domiciliary services and residential nursing care for older people.

The controversial proposal has been put forward by Sir Peter Gershon, as part of his review of how to make public services more efficient. The Treasury has asked the DoH whether procurement agencies could be set up to buy home care services and beds in care homes on behalf of several local authorities.

Fees would be set regionally and tendering processes standardised across councils, doing away with the variations that currently exist.

The Treasury believes this approach could make the process quicker and cheaper for authorities, although Community Care understands that the Department of Health is resistant to the idea.

A form of regional procurement already exists in some areas, with local authorities forming consortia to buy IT solutions and office equipment in bulk.

However, the proposals to extend the principle to care services have been criticised by the Local Government Association and the Association of Directors of Social Services.

ADSS president Andrew Cozens said local government had controlled demand and kept the cost of services down since it began managing older people's care services 10 years ago.


"If this was done regionally it would almost certainly lead to larger national providers dominating the market and costs increasing," he said.

But Fiona Street, acting chair of the UK Home Care Association, said that if commissioning was streamlined to take into account regional variations in staff availability, pay rates and ethnic diversity there could be several benefits.

"Currently, there isn't the consistency across authorities on the tendering process and this causes problems for organisations working across a number of local authorities.

"If this was standardised, we could save on administration, which would take out overheads and allow us to keep the costs we charge down," she added.