The need for health and social care teams to work together is greater than ever. In Hertfordshire, integration has been our direction of travel for many years now. For more than a decade we’ve been working with colleagues in health to get things done and we’re proud of what’s been achieved. The backdrop against which we’re working has changed immeasurably.

There’s no doubt that the savings we need to make in local government are comparably far bigger than in the NHS. If we had tried to cut our budget on our own, the savings we could have made would have just pushed the problem onto the NHS. That doesn’t benefit anyone in the long run – not the taxpayer and certainly not the people who need our support and services.