6Our inquiry, and acknowledgements
175.We announced our inquiry into the impact of the Spending Review settlement for health and social care on 10 December 2015. We noted that we would be looking in particular at:
- The distribution of funding for health and social care across the spending review period;
- Achieving efficiency savings: their source, scale and impact;
- Achieving service transformation set out in the Five Year Forward View at scale and pace through transformation funds;
- The impact and management of deficits in the NHS and social care;
- The effect of cuts to non-NHS England health budgets e.g. public health, health education and Department of Health, and their impact on the Five Year Forward View;
- Social care funding, including implications for quality and access to services, provider exit, funding mechanisms, increasing costs and the Care Act provisions;
- Impact of the spending review on the integration of health and social care;
- Quality and access in health and social care including the cost and implications of new policy objectives such as 7 day services; and
- Progress on achieving parity of esteem through funding for mental health services.
176.We received over 100 pieces of written evidence from a wide variety of individuals and organisations with an interest in health and social care. All the written evidence we received is available on our website, together with the transcripts of the oral evidence we took. We heard oral evidence from academics and think-tanks with an interest in health and social care; representatives of providers and commissioners of both health and social care; Public Health England and Health Education England; representatives of users of health and social care and of staff working in the health and social care sector; and finally the Chief Executive of NHS England, the Deputy Chief Executive of NHS Improvement (the economic regulator of NHS trusts and foundation trusts), and the Secretary of State.
177.We also visited Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust, to see the pressures affecting hospital trusts on the ground and to hear how a high-performing trust is coping with them. In the course of our visit we held a round-table meeting with representatives of voluntary sector organisations working in the health and social care sectors. The notes of our visit are included as an Annex to this report.
178.We are very grateful to all those who gave us written or oral evidence, to the voluntary sector representatives who we met in Manchester, and to all those who were involved in our visit to Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust. Our appreciation of the impact of the Spending Review on health and social care has been very much enhanced not only by the written and oral evidence which we have taken, but also by the conversations we had during the visit to Salford. We are also very grateful to our specialist adviser for this inquiry, Professor Andrew Street, Professor of Health Economics, Director of the Health Policy team in the Centre for Health Economics at the University of York, and Director of the Economics of Social and Health Care Research Unit, for his very welcome assistance throughout our inquiry.205
205 Andrew Street declared the following interests to the Committee: Professor Andrew Street has been awarded research contracts from the National Institute of Health Research and the Department of Health’s Policy Research Programme.
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15 July 2016