We welcomed the Department’s introduction of a new framework aimed at providing consistent career progression for the social care workforce (the Care Workforce Pathway) in January this year.54 However, we challenged the Department on why it had made so little progress overall on its workforce reforms which, even after scaling back, make up £265 million of the £729 million remaining for system reform.55 The Department told us that nearly all the budget goes on training and explained that these training initiatives were, in turn, dependent on the development of a bespoke new payments platform to pay suppliers directly.56 This includes the £136 million project for improving workforce training and development, originally planned for launch in September 2023, and the project to increase the number of regulated professionals, against which there was zero spend in 2022–23.57