Cymorth Cymru’s members working across the care and support sector have long been keen for Cymorth to extend its services to support their work in delivering care. Running alongside this, we have had an Inquiry into Residential Care chaired by Mark Drakeford, which called for a greater role for not for profit care providers and recommended a representative body as a way to achieve this.
Cymorth Cymru announced its commitment to exploring how this might be done at a high profile event in October 2012, where a strategic partnership was also launched with the National Care Forum which
performs this function in England. Following this event, follow up meetings were held and a steering group was convened to take this activity forward. The steering group consisted of a wide range of organisations including social care providers working across older people services, learning and physical disability services, mental health and sensory impairment, as well as representatives from housing, the Wales Co-op Centre, Learning Disability Wales and Age Cymru/My Home Life Cymru. The steering group agreed that Cymorth should explore taking on this remit and as a consequence we begun discussions with Welsh Government about how this could be taken forward.
As well as this significant activity, the Social Services and Wellbeing (Wales) Bill will place a duty on Local
Authorities to promote Social Enterprise, Co-operative, User-led and Third Sector care delivery. As part of this, Cymorth Cymru secured a grant from Welsh Government to explore how a representative body might support the duty to promote social value models, with this project running from October 2013 until the end of March 2014. This report is the outcome of the project.