Uniting Care £800m contract hand-back: we must learn lessons from this

I'm pleased that NHS England is to carry out a proper review of why there was a hand back of the £800m contract to provide adult care inCambridgeshire only a few months after it was let by the CCG after a lengthy commissioning process. At the County Council's Health Committee meeting in December we as councillors challenged the Commissioning Group on why they had only let us know of the problems just hours before they issued a press release. 

I said at the meeting that if we had had a mature relationship with the CCG they would have been advising us earlier of risks and how they were handling them, not just telling us on the day that it had gone wrong. Other councillors who had been at a seminar on adult health services only a few weeks before were also surprised at not being kept informed. 

The Health Committee has a statutory scrutiny role and I would expect that we will be involved in the NHS England review and receive a copy of its detailed findings - clearly as a council representing the people of Cambridgeshire we need to keep a very close eye on things. The Uniting Care contract was intended to bring about better systems integration, to join up front line services, and as a public sector consortium it should have had a lot going for it. I fully support the aims and goal. But we need to understand what went wrong and learn the lessons, not just hand out blame to people. 

I was told by reliable sources that the contract just couldn't be made to pay, I.e. It was too tightly drawn, and I've seen this happen before in other sectors, where the commissioners draw too tight a requirement and the suppliers haven't worked out that delivering against it is eye-wateringly tight. There has to be an incentive for the supplier, whether private or public sector, and again, there may be lessons to be learnt there too.