The Better Care Fund was created to bring health and social care together around a shared ambition: supporting people to live independently, reducing avoidable hospital admissions and enabling smoother, more coordinated care. Yet as demand on urgent and emergency services continues to rise, and as national policy and organisational structures evolve, questions are being asked about whether the Fund in its current form is still able to deliver on that promise.
In January 2026, Jen Craft MP convened a roundtable of senior leaders from across Essex, bringing together representatives from local authorities, Integrated Care Boards, NHS organisations and independent providers. The discussion explored how the Better Care Fund is working on the ground, what has been achieved so far, and what is preventing it from having greater impact. Participants were clear that the Fund has helped to normalise collaboration and remove some of the historic barriers between organisations, particularly in relation to hospital discharge and intermediate care.
However, there was also a shared view that the Fund is increasingly constrained by short-term planning cycles, late national guidance and a heavy focus on activity metrics rather than meaningful outcomes. Many felt that instead of driving transformation and prevention, the Better Care Fund has gradually become a mechanism for sustaining existing services and managing immediate pressures. This was seen as limiting its ability to support longer-term change, neighbourhood working and genuinely preventative approaches.
Despite these challenges, attendees remained strongly committed to the Fund’s original purpose. The discussion highlighted a clear appetite for reform, including longer-term funding certainty, clearer priorities, more person-focused measures of success and greater flexibility for local systems. Participants agreed that with the right changes, the Better Care Fund could play a much stronger role in supporting integration and improving outcomes for people and communities across Essex.
