“THE DIRECTOR of Social Services and Chief Executive are aware of it.”

That was the cryptic response of Pembrokeshire’s Cabinet Member for Finance Bob Kilmister when asked about the ‘business case’ the local health board has presented to the Welsh Government for the reorganisation of social care across the Health Board area.

The scheme, to merge some of the adult social care functions provided by local councils with the elderly medical care provided by the Board, is a cornerstone of the Board’s plans for the future of healthcare in west Wales and is supposed to be an example of partnership working.

Bob Kilmister wryly observed: “Whatever the plan is, the Welsh Government are reported to be in favour of it.”

There is considerable scepticism about the Board’s track record of financial mismanagement. Pembrokeshire County Council’s Director of Resources, Jon Haswell, expressed vigorous agreement with the proposition that trusting part of the Council’s already tight budget to the care of an organisation running in permanent deficit caused concern.

As the scheme is supposed to be an example of partnership working, it is equally peculiar that members of the political executive charged with implementing and carrying the can for it have been kept in the dark.

When the Board’s plans for social services were discussed at Carmarthenshire County Council in October, there was almost unanimous approval that the management of the social care scheme should be directly accountable and a significant number of councillors in favour of it being run as a discrete service with its own management structure.

At that point, Carmarthenshire’s Director of Social Services, Jake Morgan, was careful to describe the plans as the Health Board’s and suggested he was none the wiser about how social care would be structured other than through ‘partnership working’.

Only a few weeks later, a business case has gone to the Welsh Government.

There have been no briefings for elected members, no scrutiny before the business case’s submission, and what is supposed to be a partnership looks rather like the Board and the Welsh Government bouncing local authorities into a scheme into which their input has been, at best, limited.

On Monday, we asked Hywel Dda UHB about its social care plan.

We explained that we had noted the health board’s plans for greater cooperation with the social services departments of the 3 local authorities in the region. We also explained we knew that a business case to that end has been submitted to the Welsh Government for consideration.

We asked the Board to confirm that, in accordance with the principles of partnership working, all of the elected members of each local authority concerned had sight of the whole business case before its submission to the Welsh Government and that each local authority approved its content by reference to a meeting of all councillors.

We also asked what the plans’ impact would be on each local authority’s future social care budgets, what the proposed management structure was and what level of accountability it would have.

Our inquiries remained unanswered.

Not from any of the three local authorities to whom we posed that question and not from the Health Board.

The only answers we got were at the budget briefing for Pembrokeshire County Council when both the Director of Resources and Cabinet Member for Finance were refreshingly direct about their personal view of the prospects for partnership working with the Board.

Against the backdrop of the Board’s diverting interpretation of the word ‘partnership’, two of the three contenders to replace Carwyn Jones as Labour leader in Wales, Eluned Morgan and Vaughan Gething, have separately endorsed a wholesale reorganisation of social care into a National Care Service.

Such a service would be implemented and led by local government, in partnership with local health boards and third sector organisations they may wish to commission. The Welsh Government would oversee a national rollout of the provision and ensure that standards are met. The scheme would be funded by a social care levy and from savings to the NHS budget.

The fact that Councils would lead a National Care Service makes it doubly surprising that those covering West Wales have had such minimal input into the creation of a new care system there.