Personal Social Services: Staff of Social Services Departments, England 2019

There was a gross current expenditure of £18.7 billion in 2018-19 on adult social care by Councils with Adult Social Services Responsibilities (CASSRs), with 841,850 clients receiving long term care, and 1,914,500 requests for support from new clients. To provide adult social care services, staff are employed in both the public and private sectors. This publication concentrates on adult social care jobs in local authorities only, job groups include: Direct care (such as Care Workers and Community Support), Professional (including Social Workers), Manager / Supervisor staff and Other staff groups.

All data is collected from Councils with Adult Social Services Responsibilities (CASSRs) in England, however for ease of reading CASSRs will be referred to as local authorities throughout this publication.

This publication contains information on staff employed (directly and indirectly) by local authority adult social services departments in England who provide social care services to members of the public.

There were 113,300 adult social services jobs within local authorities at September 2019.

In Table 1.1 the equivalent figure in 2018 shows adult social care jobs within local authority adult social services departments accounted for 6.9% of the estimated 1.6 million adult social care jobs in England as at September 2018. Over three quarters (78.2%) of jobs in adult social care were in the independent sector. Estimates of the size of the rest of the adult social care workforce as at September 2019 will be published by Skills for Care in July 2020.

Table 1.1: Estimated number and proportions of adult social care jobs, by employer type

*Estimates of the total size of the adult social care workforce for 2019 will be published by Skills for Care in July 2020.

Source: Skills for Care - ASC-WDS

As reported in The Size and Structure of the Adult Social Care Sector and Workforce in England, 2019 (Skills for Care), since 2011 adult social care jobs have moved steadily away from local authority into the independent sector.

The number of local authority jobs has decreased by 46,100 in total or an average of 5,800 jobs each year between 2011 and 2019. Other parts of the adult social care sector have grown, between 2011 and 2018*, especially the independent sector which has increased by 205,000 jobs as seen in Figure 1.2 below.

*Local authority figures based on latest 2019 data whereas the rest of the sector is based on 2018 data

Source: Skills for Care - ASC-WDS

However, (as seen in Figure 1.3 below) in 2019 local authority jobs have increased since the previous year for the second time since reporting began from ASC-WDS in 2011. As at September 2019 there were 113,300 local authority jobs, up 0.9% (1,000 jobs) from 2018.

Source: Skills for Care - ASC-WDS - See Table 1 in Reference Data Tables

The publication does not cover staff employed by children’s social services departments or staff employed in the independent sector (private and voluntary). The Adult Social Care Workforce Data Set (ASC-WDS) does collect information about staff in the independent sector (on a voluntary basis) and as at September 2019 had received around 575,000 individual worker records from this part of the sector. Skills for Care’s ‘The state of the adult social care sector and workforce in England’ report contains information on the independent sector.