What now for deprivations of liberty?
What will the effect of the postponement of the Liberty Protections Safeguards be on local authorities? Local Government Lawyer asked 50 adult social care lawyers for their views on the potential consequences.
SPOTLIGHT |
Andrew Pettinger looks at the potential for innovative ways of delivering adult social care services including via Public/Private collaborations.
A number of local authorities, faced with decreasing budgets and an ageing population, are looking to find innovative ways of delivering adult social care, whether that be for nursing or residential care or using other models such as “extracare”.
The continued statutory duties of local authorities, combined with care and the ageing population being a high profile political issue, means that this is an area where it is very difficult for authorities to simply find savings by cutting the nature of the service. Therefore local authorities are increasingly being driven to find new ways of delivering and/or commissioning care as well as taking steps to replace or refurbish care settings that are within the control of the local authority.
We have recently seen an increasing number of proposed public/private collaborations which have been structured (or proposed to be structured) in a number of different ways, including the following:
It would also be possible for local authorities to find economies of scale by working with each other either through a joint procurement for care services or alternatively establishing frameworks for care provision that cross geographical boundaries. Though we have not seen it, it would also be possible for a controlled public sector service entity to take advantage of the Teckal exemption and provide services to more than one authority.
Such collaborations often do not yet have direct and easily identifiable precedents to draw from and often involve the letting of care contracts which are for longer periods than a common three to five-year term. We think local authorities should carefully think about the following in any such procurement:
These are not new issues and are not specific to the care sector. However, because collaborations in the care sector have been less common than in some other areas, we think that more focus than normal is required on the above.
Andrew Pettinger is a partner at Addleshaw Goddard where he leads the firm’s local government practice. He can be contacted on 07775586509 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
This article first appeared in the Local Authority Companies and Partnerships (LACAP) bulletin for April 2014. LACAP is published online by LexisNexis. For more information go to Hann Books.