Whilst the fund is already beginning to support accommodation-led solutions to social care, alongside both housing and health capital programmes, I want to move towards developing a more scalable, strategic programme of capital investment, which has housing at its core. I want us to up our game with this fund and move away from delivering just smaller—but important—localised projects to a much more innovative and truly integrated approach, prioritising accommodation-led solutions that are explicitly designed to lessen the demands on social care budgets. I am very pleased to be working closely with the Minister for Children, Older People and Social Care to better align what we do in housing and social care. The Minister for Children, Older People and Social Care and I visited an extra-care housing and care scheme under construction in Maesteg yesterday, which has care and support at its heart. Its development is informed by an assessment of local population need and local housing need and it's the kind of project we want to see more of.

I am pleased, therefore, to announce a new three-year capital programme of £105 million to support a move to a more strategic and scalable approach to accommodation-led solutions to health and social care needs. I want to see this accommodation-led approach embedded in the models of care we develop for older people and other vulnerable groups. We know the role that housing plays in people’s health and wellbeing. Housing is the platform to prevention and early intervention for social care, and it's also the key to helping make services more sustainable. The new £105 million integrated care fund capital programme aims to maximise the contribution housing interventions can make to improve service delivery, whilst also alleviating the pressures on the NHS and the delivery of social care.

Additionally, this programme responds to a number of recommendations in the report, ‘Our Housing AGEnda: meeting the aspirations of older people in Wales’, which set out a wide-ranging programme of change when it was published last year. It highlighted the need for concerted action at a variety of levels. The report was a call for action, not only by Welsh Government, but by a wide range of other stakeholders across the public, private and third sectors. The expert group behind the report recognised the importance of action at a variety of levels to bring about transformational change. The report will continue to provide a road map of the further changes still required if we are to respond adequately to the housing, health and social care challenges we face in Wales.

We are driving the integration agenda by supporting the health, social care and housing sectors to work much more collaboratively through regional partnership boards. These boards are provided for by the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014 and are the responsible for making the strategic investment decisions for the integrated care fund. They bring together health, social services, the third sector, citizens, and other partners. They have integration at their very core. I am determined to see the voice of housing coming through even more strongly in the work of regional partnership boards. The housing contribution to more effective care and support can’t simply be an optional extra; it needs to be at the core of our efforts to integrate services so as to achieve the greatest impact. So, I am pleased to be able to tell Members that we will be making housing a statutory member of regional partnership boards, and officials are exploring how this can be most effectively implemented.

Of course, providing new accommodation shouldn't be seen as the only solution. It's essential we support people to continue to live independently in their own homes as their needs change. We know that aids and adaptations are often a lifeline to people who experience a disabling environment. A suitable, well-adapted home can make the difference to someone’s ability to live independently and receive health and social care close to home, avoiding admission to hospital, or having to move to long-term residential care. We have already introduced important improvements to the system of providing small-scale aids and adaptations to help people do this. The new approach, called Enable, is focused on greater efficiency by simplifying and speeding up the process of getting an adaptation. It does this by determining the most efficient way to deliver an aid or adaptation to meet someone’s need, as there a number of funding sources available depending on a person’s circumstances and tenure. The new system also collects data to help us understand how we can improve this process still further. However, we recognise our current improved system can still be complex and needs streamlining, and a recent report by the Wales Audit Office supports that view. So, I have announced that we will be taking forward a further change programme in this area and we will be consulting on these changes in due course. We must streamline the funding and provision of services to make it more citizen focused, transparent and consistent in its delivery.

These important areas of work, alongside the new programme of capital investment, are all aimed at helping people who need support to receive the right support, whether they are older people with complex needs and long-term conditions, people with learning disabilities, children with complex health needs, or carers. Our plan for health and social care recognises the significant role appropriate housing can play in moving health and social services closer to communities in a year when we are celebrating the seventieth anniversary of the NHS, which was of course born here in Wales. What's not always appreciated is that Nye Bevan was Minister for health and housing, and his contribution to improving the quality and volume of available housing was significant. He understood that for people to live long and healthy lives they needed access to appropriate housing, and it is in that spirit that I make this statement today.