Adult Social Care Activity and Finance Report, England - 2020-21

This data quality statement aims to provide users with an evidence-based assessment of the quality of the 2020-21 statistical output from the Short and Long Term (SALT) activity collection and the Adult Social Care Finance Return (ASC-FR), reporting against the nine European Statistical System (ESS) quality dimensions.

It provides final 2020-21 information for Adult Social Care activity and expenditure in England on adults aged 18 and over for Councils with Adult Social Services Responsibilities (CASSRs) - referred to throughout this report as local authorities for ease of reading. The data are derived from the SALT and ASC-FR returns which local authorities in England submitted to NHS Digital.

This data quality statement provides information on the known data quality issues within the 2020-21 Adult Social Care Activity and Finance report and accompanying data, to allow the reader and users of the data to understand any limitations of the data. This section should be used in conjunction with the publication’s data quality summary, report and associated data files .

The SALT and ASC-FR collections are concerned with adults, defined as those aged 18 or over, and relate to adult social care services. Children’s social services are not covered in these returns, and nor are services provided to adults on behalf of children (e.g. Section 17 payments). Some local authorities are known to continue with children's services for a few clients aged 18 or over; these clients should be included within the adult returns. Most of the data is mandatory however there are a number of voluntary items in the SALT collection.

The degree to which the statistical product meets user needs in both coverage and content

The report covers activity and expenditure for local authorities in England on services for adults aged 18 and over, by service provision and primary support reason. Information on a number of accounting categories is also included such as income from the NHS, grants provided to voluntary organisations and gross and net expenditure. A number of the measures within Adult Social Care Outcome Framework (ASCOF) draw on data from the SALT collection.

Full details on the collections, and the relationship between SALT and ASCOF. 

The data is used by central government and by local authorities to assess their performance in relation to their peers. It is also available for use by researchers and charities e.g. The Kings Fund looking at local authority performance and by clients and the public to hold local authorities and government to account. It has also been used previously by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) for their Annual Performance Assessment (APA), by Age UK, by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and the National Audit Office (NAO).

The accuracy of the SALT and ASC-FR data is the responsibility of the local authorities who submit the data to NHS Digital. Both returns are aggregate collections taken from administrative systems. As NHS Digital does not have access to the individual records behind the aggregate counts, we are reliant on local authorities to assess their own data quality. A number of local authorities have advised that it was not possible to quality assure data to the same extent as in previous years.

In many instances, assessing reliability depends on local knowledge, as each local authority determines the approach taken in their area. What may be an anomaly in one area could be considered standard practice elsewhere. However, a range of activities are undertaken (outlined in more detail below) to check and improve data quality. Discussions with local authorities have provided useful anecdotal information about distributions and trends.

The submission and validation process for each collection is carried out as follows:

1. The local authority collates the data for submission in the relevant collection form. This form includes inbuilt validations to allow local authorities to check their data for common issues prior to submission.
2. Local authority submits data by the mandated deadline.
3. All local authorities who met this deadline receive a data quality report covering critical validations and providing some derived totals allowing local authorities to confirm their data is correct.
4. NHS Digital reviews the quality of all files submitted and may provide additional support to local authorities with significant data quality issues.
5. Local authorities can resubmit data to amend any identified quality issues.
6. Final deadline for submission.
7. Following the final deadline NHS Digital will carry out analysis of the quality of final data. Although local authorities cannot resubmit data after this point, they may be contacted for additional clarification or context.

The validation checks carried out throughout this process included:

• Validations across worksheets to check figures across different tables that store the same data.
• Checks for missing data items.
• Checks for instances of recorded activity without associated expenditure and vice versa.
• Comparing the unit costs with those from other local authorities and flagging outliers.
• In ASC-FR, quality assurance checks on net current expenditure totals were made against RO3 data submitted to MHCLG, and where differences were noted, local authorities were able to provide supporting explanations.  

The final validation stage consisted of looking at the responses to the validation checks mentioned above to see if there are clear instances where data submitted is implausible or local authorities have submitted data not in line with the guidance for the data collection.

We approached local authorities for additional context where outliers or inconsistencies were identified. Not everyone was able to respond and so the data quality summary reflects explanations received from local authorities, either at the point of submission or in response to our follow-up queries.

Common issues local authorities advised us of in previous years include:

In SALT

• Limitations with case management systems for reporting of some data items, particularly around full cost clients.
• Several local authorities have mentioned difficulties obtaining and/or quality assuring data from third party organisations such as mental health or carer data.

In ASC-FR

• Allocating expenditure by Primary Support Reason (PSR) in the ASC-FR can be challenging as many finance systems are not configured to collect this data.

A number of issues were raised in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, these can be found in the Summary section.

Full details of issues that NHS Digital are aware of are included in the accompanying Data Quality Summary.

Information on the number of local authorities returning data at the mandated and final deadlines across both collections is available on the completeness tab of the accompanying Data Quality Summary.

The England-level statistics for 2020-21 have been estimated as one local authority was not able to submit for SALT and two for ASC-FR. Due to a serious cyber-attack, Hackney Council has been unable to submit 2020-21 data to NHS Digital. There was also missing ASC-FR data for Rochdale.

To calculate the England and regional totals last year’s data for Hackney (SALT and ASC-FR) and Rochdale (ASC-FR) was used.

Timeliness refers to the time gap between publication and the reference period. Punctuality refers to the gap between planned and actual publication dates

The SALT and ASC-FR data collections are undertaken annually, and a report is published each year. This report relates to the financial year 2020-21 and is being released seven months after the period to which the data relates.

This publication has been released in line with the pre-announced publication date and is therefore deemed to be punctual.

Accessibility is the ease with which users are able to access the data, also reflecting the format in which the data are available and the availability of supporting information. Clarity refers to the quality and sufficiency of the metadata, illustrations and accompanying advice

This publication is now available in HTML, in order to meet the Government Accessibility Standard. Reference data tables are available to download from the NHS Digital website in Excel (.xlsx) and comma-separated values (.csv) format to allow the user access to the underlying data. Also provided through the publication pages are a Power BI interactive dashboard and supporting information to help the user understand the data more.

For SALT, the numbers in the csv and data tables are rounded to the nearest five and data values between 0 and 4 have also been suppressed, for disclosure reasons.

ASC-FR does not collect counts of people and as such is not subject to suppression.

Coherence is the degree to which data that are derived from different sources or methods, but refer to the same topic, are similar

SALT is a statutory data collection to collect Short and Long Term (SALT) support information across England; there are no current alternative sources of this data with which these can be compared.

ASC-FR analyses expenditure by type of service and type of expenditure and income and complies with the 2020-21 Service Reporting Code of Practice (SeRCOP). The SeRCOP guidelines provide details of what should be included within each of the ASC-FR reporting lines. 

The Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) publish information on expenditure collected from local authorities via the RO3 return. Expenditure on social care can be seen in the report entitled Local authority revenue expenditure and financing England: 2019 to 2020 final outturn which can be accessed via the GOV website.

NHS Digital continue to work closely with MHCLG seeking to understand discrepancies between figures submitted in the two collections. This year, extra guidance has been provided around how specific items are captured in each return, and additional quality assurance checks have been undertaken on both sets of data. As it is known that different teams often submit the two collections, submitters were asked to liaise with the colleague who fills out the RO3 return, and where there were legitimate reasons for differences, to proactively provide an explanation in the return. Part of the ASC-FR return also includes an RO3 Comparison to help assure local authorities that the ASC-FR is consistent with their RO3 returns.

Whilst there were no mandatory changes to this year’s data collections, guidance was provided to local authorities to advise that activity funded under COVID-19 hospital discharge arrangements should be captured in SALT, so long as it meets the definition of care provided under the Care Act and is being commissioned by the LA. This may mean that more clients were included in the collection over the reporting period; local authorities also told us that some of these clients would have been supported by the local authority anyway so the impact of this may vary from authority to authority.

All adult social care COVID-19 related costs should be captured in ASC-FR. Whilst separate lines have been added to the RO return for new COVID-19 associated categories, these could not be added to the ASC-FR data collection at short notice due to the associated timescales required by the change process without impacting the timeliness of the published data. It is acknowledged that some of the spending (for example, on COVID-19 hospital discharge arrangements, or by the Infection Control Fund) may not directly relate to people whose care is supported by the local authority however a decision was taken that given the increased funding, these costs should be included for completeness, reported under Commissioning and Service Delivery, as this is Adult Social Care sector support, through local authorities. This means that year on year overall totals are not directly comparable.

Trade-offs are the extent to which different aspects of quality are balanced against each other.

For the 2020-21 reporting period, two submission periods were made available for local authorities. This was consistent with last year’s return. Data Quality reports and support were made available to those local authorities who submitted by the first deadline. Local authorities were able to make updates to their data during the validation period. Further detail is available in our data quality outputs however it is important to consider this when reviewing this year’s data and changes over time.

The processes for finding out about users and uses, and their views on the statistical products

Working Groups were established with the aim to manage the development of both data collections to reflect the requirements of users and policy. The group includes representatives from NHS Digital, Department of Health and Social Care, local authorities, and for ASC-FR, CIPFA and MHCLG.

User feedback on the format and content of the 2020-21 Adult Social Care Activity and Finance report, as well as on the SALT and ASC-FR collections, is invited; please send any comments to [email protected]

Information about the Social Care collection materials 2021 is available.

Changes to upcoming collections can be seen in the most recent September letter,

The data collection process used in this publication is subject to assurance by the Data Standards Assurance Service (DSAS) (previously known as the Challenging Burden Service (CBS)). This is to ensure that data collections do not duplicate other collections, minimise the burden to all parties and have a specific use for the data collected. Further information on DSAS is available. 

The burden of the SALT and ASC-FR collections has been assessed and approved, and the burden of any changes to the collection are similarly assessed to ensure that they do not create undue burden for local authorities.

The procedures and policy used to ensure sound confidentiality, security and transparent practices

All statistics are subject to a standard NHS Digital risk assessment prior to issue. The risk assessment considers the sensitivity of the data and whether any of the reporting products may disclose information about specific individuals. Methods of disclosure control are discussed and the most appropriate methods implemented. As a result of this process, finance data is unsuppressed and unrounded whilst activity data is rounded to the nearest five.

NHS Digital aims to be transparent in all its activities. A description of the collection process and any issues with the quality of the 2020-21 activity and finance data are documented in the Accuracy and Reliability section of this data quality statement.

SALT and ASC-FR data is submitted to NHS Digital through a secure electronic file transfer system called Strategic Data Collection Service (SDCS). The submitted files are transferred from SDCS and stored on a secure network with restricted access folders.

Please see links below for more information about related NHS Digital policies:

Statistical Governance Policy [Archive Content]

Freedom of Information Process

Data Access Request Service

Privacy and data protection

Small Numbers Procedure