Social Care News

Evaluation plans set out to monitor new Social Services and Well-being law

The Welsh Government's health minister has set out plans to evaluate the effectiveness of the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014 which comes into force on 6 April 2016.  

In a written statement issued on March 31, Mark Drakeford said: "The statutory framework that underpins the Act, which is comprised of Regulations, Codes of Practice and Statutory Guidance, has now been made.

"As we shift our focus from development of this framework to delivering its commitments, it is important that we have adequate evaluation arrangements in place to be able to assess the success of this delivery. I am pleased to announce the following details of the evaluation.

"The evaluation will provide an overview of whether the Act is achieving what we set out to achieve for people who need care and support and carers who need support in Wales. The evaluation will focus on key policies, such as assessment and eligibility to provide the basis for evidenced based policy improvement and development"

Professor Drakeford has also asked officials to set up a stakeholder group to ensure the sector continues to be involved and provides a steer over this important work.

Three-part evaluation process for Social Services and Well-being Act

The evaluation will be undertaken in 3 phases:

• The initial phase will be about monitoring policies under the Act during the initial year of implementation to understand whether policy is being implemented as intended and to support policy improvement.
• The second phase will involve on-going evaluation, through the national outcomes framework and the local authority performance measurement framework. Reporting will be undertaken annually and will provide information on whether well-being is improving nationally. The first report of the national outcomes framework will be published in 2016/17 and the first report of the performance measurement framework will be in 2017/18.
• The third phase will be an independent long term one-off evaluation which will commence in the third year of the implementation of the Act.