Policy Background
4.Following the 2011 White Paper on Sustainable Social Services, social care law in Wales has been reformed and consolidated through the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014 (“the 2014 Act”) and the Regulation and Inspection of Social Care (Wales) Act 2016 (“the 2016 Act”).
5.The Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014 established a new framework for local authority social services in Wales.
6.The Regulation and Inspection of Social Care (Wales) Act 2016 provides a statutory framework for the regulation and inspection of social care services and a framework for the regulation of the social care workforce in Wales.
7.This Act seeks to make further improvements to social care in Wales, by amending the 2014 and 2016 Acts to restrict the extraction of profit from the care of looked after children; and by making a number of amendments to those Acts to ensure that they operate fully and effectively.
8.In addition, the Act enables the introduction of direct payments within NHS Continuing Healthcare (CHC), which is intended to align with the direct payments that can be made in social care.
9.This Act has been developed following a consultation on proposed changes to primary legislation on social care and continuing health care which ran between August and November 2022. The consultation documents, responses, and a summary of responses, have been published on the Welsh Government’s website: Proposed changes to legislation on social care and continuing health care | GOV.WALES .