A group of senior MPs has accused the Department for Health & Social Care of not understanding how local authorities work ahead of plans to remove their membership from integrated care boards.

Members of the Commons health & social care committee criticised plans outlined in the upcoming health bill that would remove councils from ICBs when they hold social care responsibilities and replace them with strategic authorities, which do not.

Ben Coleman (Lab), former deputy leader for Hammersmith & Fulham LBC said: “There is absolutely nothing from the department that suggests that they really understand how local authorities work and this is my experience, having sat on an ICB for three years, that the NHS is not interested in how local authorities work.”

He added: “My contention is the NHS doesn’t get local authorities, it constantly seeks to dictate to them, and this is the latest example of that”.

MPs asked the care minister Stephen Kinnock for further clarification on the future role of local authorities following the health bill as Mr Kinnock referred to strategic authorities as “strategic local authorities”.

Committee member and former Isle of Wight councillor Joe Robertson (Con) said: “Forgive me, minister. It seems like your plan’s going to make the situation more complicated.”

He asked the minister how removing local authorities with social care responsibilities “can possibly lead to improvements, in my view, it could end up taking us backwards”.

Beccy Cooper (Lab), who is a doctor with a speciality in public health, asked the minister for clarity because a “strategic authority is not the same as a unitary authority”.

She asked the minister how the ICBs will “work because the directors of social care will sit in the unitary authority, the health and wellbeing boards will sit in the unitary authority. So, at strategic authority level, where is the social care voice?”

She added that health and wellbeing boards have been “pretty patchy to date in terms of how effective and how much power they actually have”, so she said having these boards “reporting into” ICBs is “removing that direct strategic input from the social services themselves”.

Mr Kinnock said that the strategic authority, “through the mayoralty” will have a “role in bringing together all those local authorities and I don’t think we’re prescriptive about who the mayor should appoint in the planning and strategy process”.

In response, Dr Cooper said: “Just to be very clear again. The strategic authority will have a mayor, granted, for the most part, not in all places at the moment. And then there will be a board, which essentially will be the unitary authority leaders and deputy leaders. They will hold the mayoralty to account.

“That is political leadership, great, but there’s a strategic piece here where the directors of social care will sit in the unitary authorities. Are you suggesting that there will be a social care director in the strategic authority?”

Mr Kinnock confirmed that under these plans, there would be a social care director within the strategic authorities.

He told the committee that local authorities would have a “strong voice” in terms of neighbourhood health through the health and wellbeing boards and there will be a “clear connection between strategy and delivery if we get the overall strategic work right through the strategic local authorities”.

He added: “You will have then that pivotal link between the strategy at the broader population level and how that filters down through the system.

“Now you can argue that there should be a middle piece, which is the ICB, and the local authority being on the ICB. I would say that it’s probably best to have fewer layers rather than more layers, and so what we’re doing here is having that key strategic development role having then the direct connection through to the health and wellbeing board through the local authority role on the health and wellbeing board.”

Later in the discussion Mr Coleman explained that in London, the Greater London Authority “has no responsibility for social care at all and no budget for social care, it all sits” with the boroughs and they are not members of the London Assembly.

In other strategic authorities, constituent members consist of the local authorities in the region but this is not the case in the capital.

Mr Coleman added: “In London, you need to change fundamentally the relationship between the mayor and the local authorities, and if you’re going to do it in social care, you’re going to want to do it in lots of other areas, and I’m not aware this has been discussed with London leaders.

“I don’t know if it’s even discussed with the mayor, but we have no detail of what’s going to happen, something that affects 16% of the population, at least, and there are other parts of the country which will have similar concerns.”

In response, Mr Kinnock referred the question to the civil servants on the panel but added that “it’s really important to underline what we are doing on neighbourhood health and this is about bottom-up organic change, that is about changing the culture”.

Following an almost 15-minute discussion on this between Mr Coleman and director of adult social care strategy & reform Ben Dyson, chair Layla Moran (Lib Dem) intervened and said: “I just endorse that line of questioning.

“Minister, come on, I mean, come on. What was your response to that exchange? Because my colleague, is absolutely correct.

“We are the broken record on this issue over and over again. All we want are some quite basic answers. This shouldn’t be rocket science, and yet basic answers, whether it’s on the floor of the House or here we don’t get them.”

She added that the select committee has recommended an amendment on the bill that would retain local authority membership on ICBs as “from where I’m sitting right now, we have yet to hear a cogent argument for why this should happen”.

Mr Kinnock said he would “absolutely” respond to the questions posed by Mr Coleman in writing and the concerns are “all very clearly noted”.

At the end of the session as Mr Kinnock was listing the planned reforms, Ms Moran asked the minister “you genuinely believe that all of that is going to be changed for everyone in this country by the end of this parliament?”

His response: “It is our responsibility to make that happen. In order to make it happen, we need everyone to roll up their sleeves and strain every sinew to deliver it, but I think that the will is there, the ambition is there, the desire to achieve those life-changing quality of life-changing improvements for people is there.”