Commissioning report

During 2024/25, our strategic commissioning team has continued to deliver against the wide-ranging programme of work set out in the Torbay Adult Social Care Market Transformation Blueprint to support commissioning projects across health, housing and adult social care. Our Market Position Statement (MPS) 20025 (draft), reinforces our commitment to meet our moral and statutory duties. The Care Act 2014 places a duty on Torbay Council to “facilitate a diverse, sustainable, high-quality market for their whole local population and to promote efficient and effective operation of the adult care and support market as a whole. They must also ensure continuity of care in the event of provider failure”. This duty will be met within the context of four overarching strategic priorities:

Our priorities remain:

• Enabling more people to be healthy and stay healthy
• Enhancing self-care and community resilience
• Integrate and improve community services and care in people’s homes
• Deliver modern, safe and sustainable services

In line with the strength-based approach underpinning the Care Act 2014

We are working to increase the use of enabling housing-based models of care and support so that people have greater choice and control over how, where, and with whom they live and how their care is provided.

These options include

• Ambitious capital projects such as multigenerational extra care housing, smaller schemes for groups with specific needs, and new models of home care to support people's remaining living with family carers at home.
• Increase the number of people maintaining their own independence by offering better information at an early stage to enable people to recognise their own strengths and assets, combining them with voluntary or community support and access to equipment and technology to meet their needs in the first instance.
• Reduce the systemic use of residential care to meet low-level social care needs. This means not placing working-age adults into care homes wherever possible and delaying the point at which older people enter residential care. The council and our NHS partners will only commission homes capable of meeting very complex and nursing needs, working with our care home sector to constantly improve quality and capability within Torbay.
• To support and help people stay as well and independent as possible and able to manage their own well-being in their homes, wherever possible. Where care is needed, we want people to have a choice about how their needs are met and only have to tell their story once. The people receiving services must be at the heart of what we and providers deliver together.
• We want people to remain in control of their lives, to remain independent and to have the opportunity to make their own choices about their care and support arrangements.
• We will achieve this by our direct payment system being as clear as possible and allowing people true autonomy to meet their eligible care and support needs.
• To further our work, Torbay have initiated the direct payments project, which aims to review and implement recommendations for improvement. This meeting will bring together key partners from the council and the ICO for collaborative work to improve our approach to direct payments in ASC.
• We have supported a wide-ranging transformation programme which has included developing a policy framework for direct payments, redevelopment of our front door into social care and test some small-scale test of concept ideas around reablement. 

This has led to setting up some priority pieces of work to be completed in 2025/26.

We are proud of the work that continues around our LD ambassadors this has included further development of the Big Plan learning disability strategy, and an event held called the Big Event to galvanise support for the strategy.  This strategy is now leading to the development of an action plan which we are committed to starting during 2025/26.

We have also supported the trust and the council in its preparation for a pending CQC inspection process.  In June 2024 we took part in a LGA peer review for ASC which allowed us an opportunity to review our system with the support of an external team.

This year the team led on or supported an increasingly demanding stream of grant funding programmes from central government, including the market sustainability and improvement fund, the accelerated reform fund, and the better care fund. The team has provided a strategic market view that supports quality assurance workstreams such as adult safeguarding, provider quality assurance and individual packages of care that require support with services outside of adult social care.

Finally, the team has continued to directly procure and support key infrastructure services, including the community helpline and hub, Healthwatch Devon, and an extension to the Citizens’ Advice contract.