Chapter 15: Local Government, including Adult and Children’s Social Care

Local Government is an area where relatively rich data sources exist, however many of the services delivered by local authorities, particularly Education, are addressed in previous chapters. Two further services: Adult Social Care (ASC) and Children’s Social Care (CSC), are primarily although not exclusively delivered via local authorities. Adult Social Care is also significantly delivered by health services and other providers. This results in complexities relating to integrating data sources from these different agencies.

The complexities relating to multiple outputs and outcomes led to both services being areas which Atkinson (2005) and subsequently the Office for National Statistics (ONS) were unable to deliver viable output metrics for. At the time of the Bean Review (2016) both CSC and ASC were calculated on an ‘inputs = outputs’ basis.

However, given significant improvements in methods since then, the ONS delivered new methods in 2019 for both CSC and ASC. This led to improved measures and quality adjustment:

• Quality adjusted direct measures of CSC output.
• Quality adjusted ASC using a mix of direct and indirect measures, according to data availability. This therefore means some measures are quality adjusted “inputs = outputs” series, but in these areas no better direct output measures existed.

Estimates for ASC are the timeliest of any individual service, with a dataset for England produced around 11 months after the reference period.

The remaining local government services (for example, planning, environmental and waste services, libraries, democratic services) are either small or potentially eligible for inclusion in Environmental services, in particular planning, environmental and waste services. Environmental services are covered in depth in Chapter 16.

The Review therefore did not prioritise the remaining Local Government services, particularly in the light of the establishment of the Office for Local Government (OfLog), which had a data collection and analysis role in this area which was expected to grow into being a major data supplier and partner for the ONS. This is an area that requires further examination, particularly in light of HM Government’s announcement on 16^th December 2024 closing OfLog.

In addition, further work is required to understand the different nature of local government under the devolved governments and to align strategies to collect and process data on a basis which allows meaningful comparison and analysis.

15.1 Adult and Children’s Social Care

ASC reflects nearly 6% of the total expenditure of public services in 2021. Provision of ASC is the responsibility of local authorities in the UK, alongside the NHS. The ONS productivity measure covers publicly-funded ASC services provided by public providers such as local authorities and those contracted from the independent sector. Self-funded provision is excluded, as per other services, such as private schools directly procured by households. CSC accounted for 2.8% of the expenditure share of total public service output in 2021. It covers the provision of social work, personal care, protection or social support services to children in need or at risk.

Despite the developed nature of the ONS measurement of the productivity of ASC and CSC services, the Review identified some areas for improvement.

Children’s Social Care

CSC involves a range of services delivered to children and families. These include support to the private and voluntary sector which supply early years childcare via day nurseries, play-groups, pre-schools and childminders. Because these services are delivered outside the government sector, and are reflected in private sector data, it is challenging to find output measures which solely reflect government’s contribution here, for example in the form of subsidies or other support. Nevertheless, spend in this part of Children’s Social Care has at time been a material proportion of total CSC expenditure.

Without a measure of output related to these inputs, there remains concern that the productivity estimates generated may be downwardly biased if increased spending in these areas is not reflected in traditional output measures of social care provision. To combat this, the Review considers it would be beneficial to split out the elements of the service related to Early Years Childcare where output data are unavailable and measure this element by the ‘inputs = outputs’ approach.

Adult Social Care

The output of ASC is measured using a cost weighted activity index for services where activity data are available, such as the number of weeks of residential and nursing care provided. For services where activity data are not available, output is measured on the ‘inputs = outputs’ basis.

Where the productivity methodology differs from other services is that in some areas where ASC retains an ‘inputs = outputs’ methodology, this is augmented by a quality adjustment which was developed as part of previous work. The reason for this is that there remain significant gaps in data provision for some key aspects of this service which prohibits the deployment of superior measures of the number of activities, but conversely, high quality data exists on user satisfaction and objective measures of service outcomes.

Recognising this is a compromise, the Review notes the spirit of the underlying philosophy to this work, particularly ‘delivering data which are approximately right is better than delivering data which are completely wrong’. The Review agrees that the alternative of using only ‘inputs = outputs’ in this instance would be clearly inferior.

For England, a change in data collection between financial year ending 2014, and 2015 resulted in fewer activities being measured (e.g. number of hours of home care and number of ‘meals on wheels’ delivered). Until financial year ending 2014, activity data was available for residential care, nursing care, assessments of need, day care, home care, provision of meals and provision of equipment. However, from financial year ending 2015 onwards, only residential care and nursing care activity data were included in the output index.

Due to the discontinuation of the activity data source used for ASC output in Northern Ireland in 2020, output for Northern Ireland has been measured on the ’inputs = outputs’ basis since this date.

The ONS produces an annual article Public service productivity, adult social care, England: financial year, and whilst on one hand this is an important release for a growing area of public services, on the other as further improvements have been made to all other services, the ONS must consider whether this product is adding significant value.