Adult Social Care Data Intelligence - LAs Fees

The market for adult social care provision is fragile given the severe financial impact of COVID-19 on local authorities and the care sector, which has reduced occupancy and increased costs. This situation is on top of many years of constrained local authority budgets and care provider cost increases, such as those due to the National Living Wage and broader inflation. The purchase of Valuing Care's data is critical to our ability to understand whether local authorities are paying sustainable fees.

The scale of these risks and the importance of mitigating them is reflected in their inclusion on the Departmental level risk register and that whilst significant risk remains to the market, this complicates the Department's ambitions for reform.

The Department is responsible for national stewardship of adult social care markets. In response to the risks identified above, DHSC has designed a significant programme to oversee care markets, mitigate the risks to the availability of affordable, high quality adult social care, and to ensure markets at the front line are able to meet the needs of the population for care and support over the short, medium and longer term.

A key part of market monitoring conducted by analysts at the department is a comparison of the fees that LAs pay with measures of the true cost to run a care home or domiciliary care business, appropriately adjusted for local circumstances.

Access to this data intelligence and analysis is essential to ensuring the Department gains and maintains an up-to-date, objective, comprehensive and accurate understanding of current state of, and trends in, the ASC market.