Guidance

Adult social care client level data, England: background quality and methodology

Published 15 January 2026

Applies to England

Introduction

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) publishes the following statistics on adult social care:

• Adult social care provider statistics, England: quarterly update
• Adult social care client level data, England: quarterly update

These statistics are published to provide an overview of the adult social care sector, providing transparency and insight. The quarterly statistics publications aim to improve access to various data on adult social care by providing comprehensive, easily accessible bulletins.

This methodology document relates to adult social care client level data (CLD), which is classified as official statistics in development and published on a quarterly basis in January, April, July and October as part of the ‘Adult social care client level data, England, quarterly update’ publication. The latest CLD tables should always be used for the most up-to-date statistics.

Statistics from the CLD collection were previously published on a quarterly basis from March 2024 to October 2025 in the Adult social care in England, monthly statistics publication as official statistics in development, alongside the background quality and methodology note. This data is from administrative sources, submitted by councils with adult social services responsibilities (CASSRs) - referred to as local authorities in this document. This methodology and data quality statement aims to provide users of these published statistics with a detailed, evidence-based assessment of their quality. This statement will be updated as new CLD-derived statistics are introduced into the publication.

These are official statistics in development since they are using a relatively new record-level source, CLD, which has been a statutory collection since 1 April 2023. Similar CLD statistics for 2024 to 2025 were also published in the Adult social care activity report, England: 2024 to 2025 on 23 October 2025. The long-term support statistics in the quarterly publication are directly comparable with figures published in the activity report.

Background

Following engagement with local authorities, DHSC started publishing information from CLD in the March 2024 publication of Adult social care in England, monthly statistics. From January 2026, these statistics have been published in the ‘Adult social care client level data, England, quarterly update’.

Since this is a relatively new data collection, we expect there to be initial data quality issues and other complexities. Our engagement with local authorities has made us aware of implementation challenges and of variation in how services are organised and recorded locally. In line with the Office for Statistics Regulation’s standard for administrative data, we will continue to work with local authorities to address consistency in interpretation and data quality.

DHSC is also working with the CLD reference group, the Local Government Association (LGA) and the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services (ADASS) to understand how local authorities differ. This work aims to produce insights into the common activities carried out by local authorities and develop methods that generate comparable figures for benchmarking purposes.

When developing statistics for publication, DHSC will assess the data against the core dimensions of data quality set out in the government’s data quality framework.

The published metrics are:

• the number of people receiving local authority arranged or provided long-term support at the end of each month
• the number of people per 100,000 population of England receiving local authority arranged or provided long-term support
• the number of people receiving adult social care assessments, who have not received local authority long-term support in the previous 12 months
• the number of people receiving adult social care assessments per 100,000 population of England, who have not received local authority long-term support in the previous 12 months

The long-term support statistics are reported at national, regional and local authority level, by support setting, ethnicity, gender and age group. The assessment statistics are reported at national, regional and local authority level, by ethnicity, gender and age group.

CLD is based on administrative data from local authority case management systems (CMSs), which are primarily designed for service delivery. As such, while the data collection is intended to collect gender, and has a gender field defined in the CLD guidance as “the gender the individual considers themselves to be” which gives ‘male’, ‘female’ and ‘other’ options, recording practices for sex and gender can vary across councils.

LGA and the CLD local authority reference group are consulted in the development of published statistics. Local authorities have been able to view their own summary data since November 2023 through the DHSC CLD dashboard, with 99% of local authorities having accessed it to gain insight into their own data.

To find out more about how DHSC uses CLD, see:

• DHSC’s transparency statement for local authorities, which explains DHSC’s approach to using the data (published as annex D to Care data matters)
• the CLD privacy notice

Data collection

The CLD collection is the first national collection of social care records, covering requests for support, assessments, reviews and services provided or commissioned by local authorities as part of their duties under the Care Act 2014.

The aim of the CLD collection is to improve knowledge about the care and support provided or commissioned by local authorities for adults. From 1 April 2024, it replaced the SALT collection as the primary source of information about local authority adult social care. The transition from annual aggregate to quarterly client level returns will also enable more timely and flexible analysis of adult social care data, together with linked health data in the future.

The project was developed from a data linkage pilot in North West England from 2015 to 2017. This involved local authorities and clinical commissioning groups in partnership with NHS Arden and Greater East Midlands Commissioning Support Unit (AGEM CSU) and DHSC. The national voluntary collection was established in 2018. The data specification was developed by DHSC with a local authority reference group of analysts representing all regions.

In line with directions given by the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, CLD became mandatory from 1 April 2023 and local authorities are required to submit records to NHS England on a quarterly basis. The collection is operated by NHS AGEM CSU, acting as a regional data processor for NHS England.

DHSC continues to work with partners in AGEM CSU and NHS England to deliver the project centrally, engaging with local authorities through the CLD reference group, LGA, ADASS and case management system suppliers.

Further details about the collection, including the data specification and guidance, can be found on the AGEM CLD information pages for local authorities.

Data coverage

Local authority submissions

For coverage and quality of local authority CLD submissions relevant to each quarterly publication, see the ‘Notes’ tab in the accompanying data tables.

Coverage of activity within local areas

Through CLD, local authorities provide individual records of activity undertaken to support adults and their unpaid carers as part of their duties under the Care Act 2014. It includes most local authority activity under part 1 of the act to provide information, advice and support to adults (18 and older) and their unpaid carers, with the exception of safeguarding activity. It excludes:

• self-funders who arrange their care independently. CLD is based on local authorities’ case management systems. Services provided to people who pay the full direct cost of the care they receive and do not request or take up any offer of support planning or care management (for example, regular reviews) offered by the local authority will not usually be recorded on these systems
• children’s social care and activity covered by the Mental Capacity Act 2005 (and amendments to it) and the Mental Health Act 1983. Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards (DoLS) assessments and Mental Health Act assessments (assessing whether a person needs to be detained in hospital) are not included in CLD
• housing and homelessness services provided under the relevant legislation:
  • Housing Act 1996
  • Homelessness Act 2002
  • Homelessness Reduction Act 2017
  • Domestic Abuse Act 2021
• services that are fully health-funded and/or where there is no social care component. This includes arrangements put in place by the local authority on behalf of the NHS and/or where the costs are recharged to the NHS. End of life care that is funded by the NHS is not in scope of this collection but should be included when it is funded by the local authority

Local authorities have informed us of some gaps in coverage for specific areas of activity, where records are not held on their local case management systems and not easily retrievable from financial systems or external partners. For example, in some cases carer services are externally commissioned and local authorities may need to put in place data sharing arrangements to receive individual data, for inclusion in their CLD return. Similar issues can arise with jointly funded reablement services provided by external NHS partners. These gaps in carer and reablement services do not affect statistics included in the current publication describing long-term support.

For data presented in the current publication, people are included in these statistics where local authorities have identified them as actively receiving long-term support at the end of the month. There are some circumstances where local authorities may not hold individual records of people receiving long-term support - for example, where people receive long-term social care support from NHS partners under section 75 agreements (local authorities and NHS bodies pool budgets).

Under the assessment statistics, all people receiving individual care needs assessments that lead to a determination of eligibility for long-term support should be covered. These assessments are categorised as ‘long-term assessments’ in the CLD specification. People receiving other types of adult social care assessments are counted in these published statistics, but coverage may be more variable across local authorities depending on local recording practices and configuration of case management systems, such as proportional assessments (conversations), occupational therapy assessments and assessments for specific services including reablement, telecare and visual rehabilitation.

Common data processing steps

There are several common data processing steps which are applied to the raw data to generate the data for the publication. These are:

• selecting submissions covering the required analysis period and filtering the data to events ending in the period and services ongoing during the period
• cleaning data in relevant fields where the meaning of invalid values can be reasonably inferred
• excluding any service users under the age of 18
• excluding any records where the client type is carer
• grouping the derived ages into their respective age bands
• imputing event end dates when a person has died and their date of death has been provided
• creating a unique person identifier to count the number of people (see the following paragraph)

The pseudonymised traced NHS number is used to determine the number of people. If this is missing, the pseudonymised local authority provided NHS number is used. If both NHS numbers are missing, the local authority unique person identifier is used.

The metrics in this publication require data covering a long time period. Since CLD submissions contain the latest 12 months of data, these statistics use a data set created by joining sequential submissions to create a longer period going back to 1 April 2023. The reporting period stated in the submission is not taken as given, instead it is derived by checking the data in each submission. The following steps are taken to create the joined submissions data set: 

1. Identify recent submissions covering full required period.
2. Join these submissions and filter to events in required period.
3. Clean and derive new fields.
4. De-duplicate records to create a data set containing one record of each event.

For variables in the CLD data specification that have a defined list of values, efforts have been made to replace invalid values where there is a clear corresponding valid value. Those invalid values that cannot be validated are recorded as unknown. The ‘CLD data specification’ is in the ‘ASC CLD specification’ section of the AGEM CLD information pages for local authorities.

1. Long-term support

This section includes information on the number people receiving local authority commissioned long-term support at the end of each month. This is reported by region and local authority, by support setting, ethnicity, gender and age group.

From January 2026, the methodology for calculating the long-term support statistics changed to align with the Adult social care activity report, England: 2024 to 2025.

How the long-term support statistics are calculated

To calculate these figures, there are several additional processing steps applied to data, following those outlined in the ‘Common data processing steps’ section. These are:

• excluding any service records where the service type is not long-term support
• cleaning several fields required for the published tables (service type, gender and ethnicity)
• deriving age at the latest point in an event - either the age at the event end date or, if the event is open and ongoing, the age at the end of the month for each given data point

Before counting the number of people receiving long-term support, an attempt is made to identify unique service event records based on a set of distinct fields. If any of these fields differ, the record is treated as a unique event. These include the:

• person identifier (as described in the ‘Common data processing steps’ section)
• local authority code
• event start date
• client type
• service type
• service component
• delivery mechanism
• unit cost
• cost frequency (unit type)
• planned units per week

Latest person details

A data set is created which contains the most recent known details for each individual in CLD, across a range of demographic and service-related characteristics. The data set supports person-level analysis by selecting a single, consistent record per individual for a given reporting period.

The data set includes individuals who appear in the joined submissions table with any valid event type and either an NHS number or a unique local authority person identifier.

For each person in scope, the latest known value is derived for the following fields:

• gender
• ethnicity
• date of birth
• date of death
• employment status
• accommodation status (with imputation logic, described below)
• carer status (based on linked carer records and the ‘has unpaid carer’ field)
• primary support reason
• age and age bands
• client funding status

The latest details for each person are selected by applying the following prioritisation:

• known values are preferred over unknown or null values
• if multiple known values exist, the value associated with the most recent submission reporting period is selected
• if multiple values continue to exist, the value associated with the most recent event end date is selected (with nulls prioritised)
• if multiple values continue to exist, the value associated with the most recent event start date is selected
• if multiple records remain after these steps, the final value is classified as ‘unknown - conflicting’, except for age, where the earlier birth date is chosen, and date of death, where the later date is chosen, for conservatism

Additional logic is applied to accommodation status for people whose most recent records are marked as ‘unknown’ or if the records are determined unknown because they are conflicting. For these individuals the most recent service type and service component values are used to infer likely accommodation type where possible. Examples include:

• if the latest service type is long term: nursing care, the accommodation status is reported as ‘registered nursing home’
• if the person is receiving long-term support in the community with a service component of housing support, the accommodation status is recorded as ‘unknown - at home’
• if the person is receiving long-term support in the community without an identified housing-related component, the accommodation status is recorded as ‘unknown - community’

Age is calculated by taking the difference between the individual’s date of birth and the event end date (or reporting period end date if the event end date is null), producing an age at event end date field. Individuals are then grouped into standard age bands as required for downstream analysis.

The final output is stored as a central latest person details database, which can then be joined to other measure-specific tables using the unique person identifier to pull through person information.

Data aggregation

Each person will only be included once per category in each month. If there is more than one such long-term service for the same individual, the support setting with the highest ranked service type is chosen. The order of priority of supporting setting is given as follows:

1. Nursing care
2. Residential care
3. Community
4. Prison

To calculate the number of long-term support users per 100,000 people, the number of people receiving local authority commissioned long-term support is divided by the respective population then multiplied by 100,000. Populations split by age and sex are taken from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) 2024 mid-year estimates. Caution should be applied when interpreting proportions of people receiving long-term support by gender, as CLD collects information on gender (see the ‘Background’ section in the ‘Introduction’ for more information) whereas the ONS populations are broken down by sex. These proportions are presented for illustrative purposes only.

The populations split by ethnicity are from the ONS 2021 Census because the granular breakdown of ethnicity is not available in the mid-year estimates. This means that there will be slight differences in the aggregate populations and rates presented in table 6 compared to tables 4 and 5.

Categories relating to people with unknown or unrecorded demographic data have not been included in tables 4, 5 and 6 of long-term support statistics. This is because it is not clear that the groups in the respective data sets correspond. These tables do not include data on the prison support setting because the numbers of people are generally small, and we are not currently including prison population data. In some cases, ONS has had to make changes to the data to ensure personal data is protected. This means that the populations used differ slightly depending on how the data is broken down.

How the long-term support statistics can be used

The data can be used to gain insights into national trends and user characteristics.

Particular caution is advised when using the data to compare local authority long-term service user numbers, with reference to those noted as having poor coverage or other data quality issues. This data cannot be used to attempt to identify good or bad local authority performance.

Population rates can be used to compare groups across demographics and geography, however, the impact of data quality should be considered when drawing conclusions.

Individuals can be included under multiple breakdowns - the totals only count people once. In addition, all counts are rounded to the nearest 5. For these reasons, the data should not be summed across individual rows, and the total rows should be used instead.

CLD has been published as official statistics in development. As a new data collection, we expect there to be data quality issues and other complexities, and these should be considered in any use of the published data.

Comparability and coherence of long-term support statistics

The long-term support metric in this quarterly publication is comparable with the long-term support metric LTS001b in the Adult social care activity report, England: 2024 to 2025. Both metrics use the same data source and methodology. This publication reports quarterly and publishes provisional data points for the number of people receiving long-term support on the last day of each month within a 12-month period. However, the activity report publishes one data point for the end of the reporting period (31 March 2025). For the data point relating to 31 March 2025 in the quarterly publication, this is published as provisional and the figures may not match with the activity report as local authorities can revise their submissions (see the ‘Revisions’ section for more information).

Long-term support statistics were previously published in the Monthly statistics for adult social care. The methodology to calculate the long-term support statistics changed from January 2026 and is different for the 2 publications, meaning that they are not comparable.

2. Assessments

This section includes information on the number of people receiving adult social care assessments, who have not received local authority long-term support in the previous 12 months.

How the assessments statistics are calculated

This statistic describes the number of people who have had their individual care or support needs assessed by local authorities, excluding people who received local authority arranged or provided long-term support within the previous 12 months. It includes people that are recorded as having received any type of assessment in CLD, in addition to request events that are flagged as being proportional assessments (‘conversations’) as part of a ‘3 conversation model’. This is in line with the CLD collection guidance.

This statistic excludes people that have received long-term support within the previous 12 months because, in many cases, reassessments following long-term support are part of a person’s ongoing care.

This statistic is an indicator of the level of new demand for care and support facing local authority adult social care services. It does not, however, capture the outcomes of these assessments, and assessed needs may be met in a range of different ways and not only through services arranged or provided by the local authority.

This is reported by region and local authority, and by ethnicity, gender and age group.

The following steps, in addition to the steps outlined in the ‘Common data processing steps’ section, are taken to identify and count people that will be included in the statistics:

1. Filter to only include events with the assessment or request event types and mention of ‘conversation’ in the event description field. 
2. Exclude remaining events where the person was receiving long-term support within the 12 months before the event end date of the assessment. 
3. Only include assessments which are the first for the person in a 12-month period.

The presented statistics are counts of people from the resulting data set. This is presented by calendar month of the assessment end date, along with the total number of people receiving an assessment during a 6-month period.

To calculate the number of adult social care assessments per 100,000 people, the number of people receiving adult social care assessments who have not received long-term support in the last 12 months from local authorities is divided by the respective population then multiplied by 100,000. Different age groups are used for number of people receiving assessments and rate per 100,000.

Populations split by age and sex are taken from the ONS 2024 mid-year estimates. Caution should be applied when interpreting proportions of people receiving assessments by gender, as CLD collects information on gender (see the ‘Background’ section in the ‘Introduction’ for more information) whereas the ONS populations are broken down by sex. These proportions are presented for illustrative purposes only.

The populations split by ethnicity are from the ONS 2021 Census because the granular breakdown of ethnicity is not available in the mid-year estimates. This means that there will be slight differences in the aggregate populations and rates presented in table 6 compared to tables 4 and 5.

Categories relating to people with unknown or unrecorded demographic data have not been included in tables 4, 5 and 6. This is because it is not clear that the groups in the respective datasets correspond. In some cases, ONS has had to make changes to the data to ensure personal data is protected. This means that the populations used differ slightly depending on how the data is broken down.

How the assessments statistics can be used

The data can be used to gain insights into national trends and user characteristics.

Figures describe the number of people who received assessments in England. Variations by region, local authority, age group, gender and ethnicity partly reflect differences in size and characteristics of these groups in the population. They cannot be used directly to infer differences between different sized population groups or regions. This data cannot be used to attempt to identify good or bad local authority performance.

Population rates can be used to compare groups across demographics and geography, however, the impact of data quality should be considered when drawing conclusions.

This statistic is designed to indicate the level of new demand for care and support faced by local authority adult social care systems, but it does not reflect the full extent of the process and does not intend to measure the associated work or burden on adult social care systems.

All counts are rounded to the nearest 5. For these reasons, the data should not be summed across individual rows, and the total columns should be used instead. This is reported by region and local authority, and by ethnicity, gender and age group.

CLD has been published as official statistics in development. As a new data collection, we expect there to be data quality issues and other complexities, and these should be considered in any use of the published data.

Comparability and coherence of assessments statistics

Data on assessments was not published in the Adult social care activity report, England: 2024 to 2025 so direct comparisons are not possible. The number of people receiving an assessment over a 12-month period in England can be considered in relation to the figure of 2.0 million new requests for adult social care support received by local authorities in the year ending 31 March 2025, as published in the activity report.

Assessments statistics were previously published in the Monthly statistics for adult social care and are directly comparable to assessments statistics published in this report.

Statistical quality

This section measures the adult social care statistics against the dimensions of quality set out by the Government Statistical Service for statistical outputs. Any feedback on these statistics is welcome and can be sent to asc.statistics@dhsc.gov.uk.

Relevance

These statistics are published to provide an overview of local authority commissioned adult social care, providing transparency and insight. The publication aims to improve access to various data on adult social care by providing a comprehensive, easily accessible report and analysis.

Accuracy and reliability

The accuracy and reliability of the data is dependent on the quality of data submitted by local authorities. CLD returns are drawn from local authorities’ case management systems and should reflect the activity and outcomes at the time of the event with minimal additional processing required. Differences in local case management IT systems, processes and procedures influence how data is recorded and reported for the CLD collection. Even where the returns are an accurate description of local activity, differences in the way that activity is organised and recorded by local authorities needs to be understood and considered when attempting any comparative analysis or benchmarking.

As a new collection of administrative data, there will also be some unquantifiable data quality issues that could affect the accuracy and reliability of the published statistics.

DHSC has worked with the CLD local authority reference group to develop the CLD specification and guidance. DHSC produced a principles statement for local authorities (available on the AGEM CLD information pages for local authorities) emphasising that local authorities should be pragmatic in providing submissions that best match the specification and guidance, paying particular attention to ensure that where a defined list applies, the submission matches this wording identically. DHSC and AGEM CSU also provide tools to local authorities to assess and improve the quality of their data and ensure their data aligns with the specification. The emphasis is on correcting data quality issues at source, with quality assurance processes to support this.

Local authorities are asked to use the comments box (in the NHS England Data Landing Portal (DLP)) when they submit their data, to indicate where information is not currently available and describe plans to include it in future returns. Local authorities can also contact DHSC directly if further clarification of the guidance is needed. Any data quality issues, including those reported through the comments box, are appropriately described in each quarterly update.

Several local authorities have notified us of data quality issues that they intend to correct in future submissions, so we expect data quality and coverage to improve over time for these local authorities. Improvements in data quality have already been seen each year since client level data collection began.

Future publications will update the statistics described in this document, and these may include revisions as data quality improves.

In the assessment statistics, the final month in the timeseries may be affected by delays in recording of completed assessments leading to an underreporting in published values. The extent of this will be investigated in future publications where historic values will be revised.

Statistical disclosure control methods

Statistical disclosure control methods are applied to the CLD statistics in the quarterly publication to protect individuals from being identified. Counts below 5 are suppressed, indicated by [c] in the accompanying data tables, and all counts are rounded to the nearest 5 to prevent low counts being deduced.

Timeliness and punctuality

CLD is a quarterly collection, and the submission schedule (available to view on the AGEM CLD information pages for local authorities) mandates that data must be provided by the end of the month following the mandatory reporting period. CLD statistics in the quarterly publication are produced using the single latest submission from each local authority providing it covers the latest mandatory reporting period. Data is taken for the publication some time after the submission window ends. The exact cut-off date is determined for each publication based on the data quality of submissions.

Updates to these statistics are planned quarterly. This data is published approximately 13 weeks after the end of each reporting period and approximately 9 weeks after each submission deadline.

Accessibility and clarity

These statistics are freely available on GOV.UK, with all documents published in an accessible format. The statistical reports and this data quality statement are published in HTML and accompanying data tables are published in OpenDocument Spreadsheet (ODS) format. Additionally, the commentary is written with the aim of being clear and impartial.

The sections on how the statistics can be used are included to ensure users have sufficient information to use and interpret the data appropriately.

CLD statistics are published as official statistics in development. As such DHSC will continue to engage with users and stakeholders to ensure the statistics develop in line with user needs and with the aim of them becoming official statistics in due course.

Quality assurance: overview

Working with AGEM CSU, DHSC provides accessible data quality reports to local authorities to help them improve the completeness and accuracy of their data as it relates to specific areas of analysis. We will continue to make clarifications to the guidance where needed to support consistent returns.

CLD is submitted quarterly by local authorities with adult social care responsibilities. To produce their returns, local authorities extract data from their case management and financial systems, and in some cases collect data from partners (where activity is outsourced and appropriate data sharing agreements are in place). Local authorities carry out processing to compile their return as a CSV file, in line with the CLD specification. An Excel data validation tool is provided to enable local authorities to check that their data conforms to the formatting of the specification and outputs basic aggregations to support sense checking.

The collection is operated by AGEM CSU in their capacity as NHS England’s North West Data Services for Commissioners Regional Office. Local authorities upload their returns to the DLP and AGEM CSU ingests the data into a central NHS England database. Automated data validation checks are carried out to evaluate whether the data meets expected data types and defined list values and NHS number tracing is performed. AGEM CSU then provides data validation reports back to local authorities, including optional NHS number tracing results.

Due to the variation in the way that activity is organised and recorded across local authorities, the specification will not always fit with local terminology or recording. Guidance is provided to support local authorities mapping local definitions to the CLD specification. DHSC is committed to regularly reviewing and updating this guidance and continued co-development of the data specification with NHS England and the local authority CLD reference group.

DHSC analysts access CLD remotely through a secure repository hosted by AGEM CSU. Checks are carried out after each quarterly submission deadline to ensure that all local authorities have submitted a return covering the required reporting period. These checks identify any data quality issues that need to be addressed, and analysts will contact local authorities where issues are identified.

Quality assurance: data validity

Data is evaluated as valid where it meets expected data types and defined list values, in line with the CLD data specification, or where it is provided blank and may be legitimately blank. For example, ‘event end date’ should be left blank for services that are open and ongoing. Data validation will not pick up incorrect data where a valid value has been supplied. For example, invalid blanks will be incorrectly evaluated as valid, for example, where an event has ended but the ‘event end date’ has been left blank. Similarly, where client type has been categorised as ‘unknown’, this will be evaluated as valid but may be excluded from statistics in this report. Invalid responses have been corrected where the intended valid response is clear.

Quality assurance: data processing

The data is processed every month, using a reproducible analytical pipeline (RAP). This RAP has been set up so that only limited manual intervention is necessary each month to produce updated outputs. This means that the risk of human error is minimised throughout the process.

All production code is written by DHSC staff. Any changes made to the code, or new code added, is rigorously tested and peer reviewed before it is incorporated in the production process.

In addition, version control is assured through the use of Git and GitHub. This version control software is used to track changes in code files and to ensure thorough verification and validation is performed every time the code is edited. Changes to a piece of code are systematically reviewed by a different analyst who takes on the role of quality assurer.

Quality assurance: statistical commentary

Text changes in the bulletin are made by one person and are then checked and cleared by another person afterwards.

Revisions

From April 2024 onwards, submissions cover a 12-month rolling reporting period. Local authorities can revise data in submissions within this 12-month reporting period. The quarterly publication uses the latest submission covering the mandatory reporting period. Therefore, data points are published as provisional until revisions can no longer be made to submissions. Each quarter, the timeseries will be updated with the latest data, which may result in revisions to the statistics in this report.

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