Personal Social Services: Staff of Social Services Departments

Transfer of responsibility for publishing statistics on the Adult Social Care employed by Local Authorities from NHS Digital to Skills for Care

We are writing to inform you of the arrangements to transfer responsibility of the publication of Personal Social Services: Staff of Social Services Departments from NHS Digital to Skills for Care ahead of the next release in Spring 2022.

The Skills for Care Adult Social Care Workforce Data Set (ASC-WDS, formerly NMDS-SC) is the leading source of adult social care workforce intelligence, powering many reports. It holds information on around 20,000 establishments and 650,000 workers across England. NHS Digital’s predominant focus around social care statistics is around local authority support, including activity, expenditure, experience and how they safeguard their citizens: local authorities spent £19.7 billion (gross current expenditure) on adult social care in 2019-20.  

Alongside this, at present NHS Digital publishes data on the subset of the adult social care workforce employed by Local Authorities (approximately 7% of the overall workforce) as National Statistics, sourced from the ASC-WDS dataset. Transferring production of statistics on this subset of the workforce to Skills for Care will improve value and coherence by having the end-to-end process for these statistics in a single organisation specialising in adult social care workforce reporting and analysis, enabling alignment with other sectors of the social care workforce. NHS Digital will continue to focus on statistics around activity, finance, experience, and safeguarding citizens whilst progressing the DHSC “Data saves lives” data strategy in respect to improving data for adult social care. This responds to some of the themes in the OSR review of Adult Social Care statistics

Our immediate priority is to ensure a smooth transition in order that users of this publication are not negatively impacted by this change.

Governance and Engagement

The plan for the transition has been developed by representatives from NHS Digital and Skills for Care, whilst stakeholders from the Department for Health and Social Care and other users of Adult Social Care data represented on the Adult Social Care Data Outcomes Board have been kept informed throughout the discussions. Throughout, there has been engagement with the NHS Digital Chief Statistician and the Office for Statistics Regulation, which will continue throughout the transition period and beyond.

Workstreams involved

This only impacts the Personal Social Services: Staff of Social Services Departments publication, as Skills for Care already manage the collection of this data. To note, all other NHS Digital Adult Social Care Statistics publications, where NHS Digital manage the end-to-end collection process, are unaffected by this announcement.

How will this affect the production and delivery of adult social care workforce data and statistics?

Skills for Care are the leading source of workforce intelligence for the adult social care workforce in England and already release a number of reports, infographics and interactive visualisations using the information collected in the Adult Social Care Workforce Data Set (ASC-WDS). Staff from the Adult Social Care Statistics team in NHS Digital will work with their Skills for Care counterparts through a transition period to hand over responsibility for the release of Personal Social Services: Staff of Social Services Departments publication. As part of this transition process, the National Statistics badging will be removed but NHS Digital will support Skills for Care with their voluntary adoption of the Code of Practice for Statistics, and any future redesignation once the necessary legislative changes have been made to add Skills for Care to the Statistics Order. Prior to becoming an official statistics producer, Skills for Care would publish information about how it intends to apply the Code of Practice for Statistics, in line with other producers who have voluntarily adopted the Code.

There will be no change to the publication schedules, data standards or data sources during this period, and as Skills for Care already manage the collection process, there will no change of contact arrangements for local authority data providers. Mandation through the single data list continues, however the list will be updated to reflect the change in statistics producer.

In the meantime, if there are any queries, or if you would like more detail on the transition plan, please contact: enquiries@nhsdigital.nhs.uk