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Publication, Part of

Estates Returns Information Collection, Summary page and dataset for ERIC 2021/22

Official statistics, Other reports and statistics

Publication Date:
13 Oct 2022
Geographic Coverage:
England
Geographical Granularity:
Primary Care Organisations, Care Trusts, Clinical Commissioning Groups, Community health services, Hospital Trusts, NHS Trusts, Regions, Councils with Adult Social Services Responsibilities (CASSRs), GP practices, Hospital and Community Health Services, Independent Sector Health Care Providers, Primary Care Trusts, Mental Health Trusts, Clinical Commissioning Regions, Ambulance Trusts, Country
Page contents

Summary

These are the results from the 2021/22 Estates Return Information Collection (ERIC), a mandatory collection for all NHS trusts including Ambulance trusts. It comprises information relating to the costs of providing and maintaining the NHS Estate including buildings, maintaining and equipping hospitals, the provision of services e.g. laundry and food, and the costs and consumption of utilities. Data Report Tables 2 (Cost of Occupancy of the NHS Estate), 12 (Energy) and 14 (Waste) were revised on 23rd November 2023, as well as the site data (please see below).

As part of our analysis of the 2021/22 data, an enhanced data quality assurance exercise was conducted in conjunction with NHS England/Improvement (the collection sponsors). Both organisations worked closely with trusts to clarify requirements and support accurate reporting.

Data users should note that several data fields are currently labelled as unreliable due to having changed definition since the previous reporting period, or due to being introduced relatively recently. Please see the introduction and data quality worksheets for more information.

NHS Digital has continued to work alongside stakeholders and data providers to improve data quality for the 2021/22 collection. This included an extensive data assurance exercise, and further data definition refinement. At national level, information is considered to be broadly comparable across the same type of data providers although statistics should still be treated with caution, especially where labelled as experimental. 

Please ensure you use these statistics with reference to the Data Quality Statement. This will be updated should any errors be reported after publication.  The current version is number 5, published on the 23rd November 2023.

Following expert scrutiny by NHS England regional leads into waste and energy costs and usage in late 2022, a number of trusts identified errors in previously reported figures for 2021/22. During further consultation in 2023, updated figures were supplied and we published revised figures on the 23rd November 2023.

Tables 2 (Cost of Occupancy of the NHS Estate), 12 (Energy) and 14 (Waste) have been revised, as well as the background data quality report and the site data (in the report tables and the .csv file). Associated key facts are also affected and have been revised below on this page. The updated documents are version 4 of the data report, version 3 of the site data, and version 6 of the data quality statement. We apologise for any inconvenience caused, and urge users to download and use the latest versions of our ERIC products. No other figures are affected. 

Please also note that the total laundry and linen cost was corrected to £224.2 million from the originally published value of £164.5 million on 21st October 2022 - an increase of 8.9% since the previous reporting year. 

For the period 1st April 2021 to 31st March 2022, NHS organisations reported:

The total costs of running the NHS estate were £11.1 billion

This is an 8.7 per cent increase since 2020/21.

The total energy usage from all energy sources across the NHS estate was 11.4 billion kWh

This is an 0.2 per cent decrease since 2020/21.

The total cost to eradicate backlog was £10.2 billion

This is an 11.0 per cent increase since 2020/21.

This is also known as 'backlog maintenance' and is measure of how much would need to  be invested to restore a building to a certain state based on a state of assessed risk criteria. It does not include planned maintenance work (rather, it is work that should already have taken place).

The total cost for cleaning services was £1.2 billion

This is an increase of 7.5 per cent since 2020/21.

The total cost of providing inpatient food was £0.7 billion

This is an increase of 6.9 per cent since 2020/21.

Please note that any costs, capital and/or revenue related to Covid-19 incurred during the reporting year are not included in ERIC figures where they were allocated to a specific trust-wide Covid-19 budget. However, any additional costs allocated to pay and non-pay budgets in specific areas such as cleaning, waste and energy relating to Covid-19 were included where they could not be identified and removed.

Last edited: 15 January 2024 3:26 pm