Personal Social Services: Expenditure and Unit Costs, England - 2015-16

The Personal Social Services Expenditure and Unit costs publication is an annual report on the social care expenditure of Councils with Adult Social Services Responsibilities (CASSRs).

In 2007-08 information on social services expenditure was collected separately for children's and adult social care expenditure. From 2008-09, the expenditure on children's social services became the responsibility of the Department for Education and was removed from the Personal Social Services: Expenditure and Unit Costs (PSS-EX1) return. This report provides information for expenditure on services for adults aged 18 and over only.
Due to changes in the composition of social care funding and expenditure over time, caution should be exercised when considering long-term trends.

As a result of the Zero Based Review (ZBR), there have been a number of changes to the national data collections for adult social care since the 2013-14 reporting year. The changes that have an impact on the Personal Social Services: Expenditure and Unit Costs publication are the replacement of the old return (PSS-EX1) with the Adult Social Care - Finance Return (ASC-FR) collection in 2014-15 and the introduction of the Equalities and Classifications Framework (EQ-CL), which has resulted in changes to some of the data collected as part of this process. 2015-16 is the second year of the ASC-FR Collection.
In order to account for some of these changes, information about expenditure on adult social care between 2004-05 and 2013-14, from sources including CASSRs and the NHS, is provided in Appendix C. In addition bridging data has been collected in 2014-15 and 2015-16 to allow for some top level comparisons with the PSS-EX1 return.
NHS Digital has worked with CASSRs in order to attain complete data submissions from all 152 CASSRs for this publication. The quality of the data is assessed by NHS Digital and further information on the quality of these data can be found in the separate Data Quality report which accompanies this publication.
This year the publication also contains experimental data regarding Deferred Payment Agreements (DPAs). The DPA collection was newly introduced in 2015-16 on a voluntary basis and some summary figures have been included in Appendix A for information. This data was provided by 56 CASSRs and should be treated with caution as it will not represent a full picture of DPA activity across England.
The DPA Collection will be part mandatory in 2016-17, and fully mandatory in 2017-18.

Please note: the reference tables accompanying this report have been updated on 19/01/2017. This update has amended a labelling issue within table 17b, which included experimental data regarding Deferred Payment Agreements (DPAs), wherein the "Total Value of DPAs during the year" was mislabelled as the "Total Value of outstanding DPAs at 31st March" and vice versa.

The error has now been corrected, we apologise for any inconvenience caused. The main report and supporting csv files remain unaffected by this issue. If you have any queries or concerns regarding this then please contact us at [email protected].

The comparator tool accompanying this publication was reissued on 19/01/2017. The latest version now uses the most up to date nearest neighbour data available from CIPFA, and so some comparator groups in the tool may have changed. The data reported for each CASSR remains unaffected.