Law commission

This document analyses the responses received to the Law Commission’s consultation paper, Adult Social Care, published on 24 February 2010. The consultation paper set out 57 provisional proposals and 25 consultation questions on reforming the legal framework for adult social care. The overall aim of the reform is to provide a clearer, modern and more cohesive legal framework for adult social care.

Adult social care refers to the responsibilities of local social services authorities towards adults who need extra support. The legal framework for the provision of adult social care services dates back to 1948, and consists of a complex and confusing patchwork of legislation. A project to reform legal framework of adult social care law in order to address inconsistencies was announced in June 2008. This document summarises the main recommendations from the final report.

This consultation paper considers how the law should regulate deprivations of liberty involving people who lack capacity to consent to their care and treatment arrangements. Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights guarantees the right to personal liberty and provides that no-one should be deprived of their liberty in an arbitrary fashion.

This consultation paper reviews the law relating to adult social care in England and Wales. Current law has been identified as complex and outdated and these proposals aim to establishing a simple, consistent, transparent and modern framework. The paper is in 14 parts. Part 2 considers the approach to the reform of adult social care law. Parts 3 to 10 are concerned with how social services decide on what services to provide.

The Law Commission’s Tenth Programme of Law Reform includes a project to review adult social care law in England and Wales. The Department of Health is the lead department for this project. The first stage of the project is to undertake a scoping review of adult social care law and to publish a report setting out the proposed agenda for the substantive project. This summary provides a brief overview of the areas of reform identified in the Scoping Report and the direction of our review in each area. 

A project to review the law relating to the provision of adult social care in England and Wales. The legislative framework for adult residential care, community care, adult protection and support for carers is inadequate, often incomprehensible and outdated.  It remains a confusing patchwork of conflicting statues enacted over a period of 60 years.  There is no single, modern statute to which service providers and service users can look to understand whether (and, if so, what kind of) services can or should be provided.