PUBLIC agencies set up to integrate care services have come under fire in a new report published today over their lack of spending and leadership in tackling drug and alcohol addictions.

Holyrood’s health committee has been examining the work of integration authorities (IAs), which were established in 2016 to bring together health and social care in a single system.

But MSPs on the committee said IAs — which spends some £8 billion of public cash a year — were “taking allocation and investment decisions without assessing, or even possessing the ability to assess, the relationship between the effectiveness of spending on outcomes.”