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Health and Social Care Bill

Do I support a rights-based approach in social care? Yes. However, the primary objective for a regulator is to protect the public against risk. By all means encourage a regulator to promote a rights-based approach, but it is more for Governments and Parliaments to specify rights, which then become part of the day-to-day business of providing services. I do not want to carry out a course 100 seminar on commissioning and contracting, but what I mean by ““commissioning”” is starting with a local needs-based assessment, specifying what services actually have to be put in place to meet those needs and contracting for those, and deciding at the end of the day to turf a contractor out when it persistently declines to provide the services of the quality, and at the price, that it has agreed. To my mind, contracting is a narrower concept than commissioning, but commissioning ultimately embraces contracting.