Official Statistics

Adult social care in England, monthly statistics: March 2024

Published 7 March 2024

Applies to England

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About these statistics

This is a monthly publication by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) of official statistics on adult social care in England. Official statistics are produced in accordance with the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 and the Code of Practice for Statistics, and meet high standards of trustworthiness, quality and public value. Statistics derived from client level data (CLD), which are being published for the first time in this publication, are classified as official statistics in development.

These statistics are assessed regularly and any improvements in quality are incorporated accordingly at the next available opportunity. The scope of the data included in this publication is also assessed to ensure the value of these statistics is maintained. Data collection may change in response to shifts in priorities, leading to corresponding adjustments in this bulletin’s reporting.

Introduction

This statistical bulletin provides an overview on a range of information on social care settings. We are transforming the content of the publication to capture a broader social care picture and to utilise new data as it becomes available. Details of new data and content can be found in the ‘Publication updates’ section, below.

This report provides information on:

• occupancy levels in care homes at national, regional and local authority level
• uptake of full primary course and autumn 2023 booster doses of COVID-19 vaccinations, and flu vaccinations for the 2023 to 2024 season, in adult social care settings at national, regional and local authority level
• visiting in care homes at national, regional and local authority level
• staff absence rates due to COVID-19 in care homes and domiciliary care at national, regional and local authority level
• insights from the CLD collection on people receiving local authority commissioned long-term support at national, regional and local authority level, which are published as official statistics in development

Data on occupancy and visiting in care homes, staff absence and vaccinations in this publication is taken from Capacity Tracker. Capacity Tracker is a web-based digital insight tool originally developed by NHS England and the Better Care Fund to enable the system to better manage hospital discharges by identifying available capacity in care homes. It enables care homes to share their vacancies in real time, meaning hospital discharge teams and other health professionals can rapidly search availability throughout England. Since spring 2020, the tool has also been used by DHSC to gather COVID-19-related data to help monitor the sector’s response to the pandemic.

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. It has been mandatory for local authorities to submit social care records to NHS England quarterly since April 2023.

For more information on data sources, the data previously published as part of this report and other published sources of adult social care data, see Adult social care in England statistics: background quality and methodology.

Publication updates

Updates to current report

Occupancy in care homes

This report features data on occupancy in care homes for the first time.

Official statistics in development: client level data

CLD enables more frequent and detailed reporting about adult social care activity and service delivery. This will support improved benchmarking, care market oversight, service planning and commissioning.

Statistics from CLD are being published for the first time in this report as official statistics in development. We will add more CLD-based statistics to future publications as more data is collected and data quality improves.

NHS England operates the CLD collection, which has been mandatory for local authorities since April 2023, on behalf of DHSC. The purpose of the collection and ways it can be used are set out in the CLD transparency notice on the NHS England website.

Local authorities submit social care records every quarter to NHS England, starting from July 2023 (April to June, quarter 1 submission). To protect individuals’ identities, NHS England applies techniques to pseudonymise the data and remove individual identifying information before it is shared and analysed.

The way that DHSC uses pseudonymised CLD records is set out in our privacy notice and transparency statement. See:

• Adult social care client level data: privacy notice
• Care data matters: a roadmap for better adult social care data - Annex D

Other uses of CLD in published statistics

CLD will replace the Short and Long Term Support (SALT) collection as the primary source of information about local authority adult social care activity from 1 April 2024.

For the existing SALT return, local authorities collect data over the financial year and analyse this data locally to create statistics that are submitted to NHS England in May each year. These are published in autumn in the annual Adult Social Care Activity and Finance Report. SALT will end on 31 March 2024.

NHS England is leading work to develop methods (central transformation principles) that recreate statistics from the SALT collection using CLD. For further information on this work, see NHS England’s central transformation principles.

A comparison of the CLD-based statistics in this publication with the LTS001b (number of people actively receiving long-term support on 31 March 2023) statistics reported via the 2022 to 2023 SALT return confirms that these statistics are comparable for almost all local authorities.

Updates on future reports

The next publication will be released on 4 April 2024. Dates for future publications will be announced on the GOV.UK publication release calendar.

Digital social care records

We are exploring data sources for estimates of digital social care record (DSCR) uptake and will publish these in a future publication.

Main points

This section discusses the main points of interest from the data tables, available on the Adult social care in England, monthly statistics: March 2024 page. For further detailed analysis on this data, including regional and demographic breakdowns, see the ‘Further analysis’ section below.

Occupancy

As of the week ending 14 February 2024:

• 85.7% of beds in care homes were occupied
• 11.2% of beds in care homes were vacant and admittable
• 3.1% of beds in care homes were vacant and non-admittable

Figure 1: occupancy chart

Rates of occupied beds, vacant and admittable beds, and vacant and non-admittable beds have remained stable over the January 2023 to February 2024 period.

Source: Capacity Tracker

COVID-19 and flu vaccination in social care settings

As of the week ending 18 February 2024, the proportions who had received an autumn booster dose of the COVID-19 vaccine were:

• 10.1% of total staff of older adult care homes
• 9.2% of total staff of younger adult care homes
• 9.0% of total domiciliary care staff

As of the week ending 18 February 2024, the proportions who had received a flu vaccination for the 2023 to 2024 season were:

• 64.2% of total residents and 9.9% of total staff of older adult care homes
• 51.3% of total residents and 9.1% of total staff of younger adult care homes
• 9.5% of total domiciliary care staff

Figure 2: percentage of residents of older and younger adult care homes who have received their 2023 to 2024 flu vaccine, England, 24 September 2023 to 18 February 2024

Since the week ending 24 September 2023, reported 2023 to 2024 flu vaccination rates have increased steadily among residents of older and younger adult care homes. Flu vaccination rates are highest among residents in older adult care home settings.

Source: Capacity Tracker

Figure 3: percentage of staff in older and younger adult care homes and domiciliary care who have received their 2023 to 2024 flu vaccine, England, 24 September 2023 to 18 February 2024

Since the week ending 24 September 2023, reported 2023 to 2024 flu vaccination rates have increased steadily among staff in older and younger adult care home and domiciliary care settings. Flu vaccination rates are highest among staff in older adult care home settings.

Source: Capacity Tracker

Notes:

• the timeseries for the proportion of domiciliary care staff who have received the flu vaccine begins on 1 October 2023. This is because the figure for the week ending 24 September 2023 has been suppressed to avoid identification
• the proportion of staff receiving flu vaccinations is much lower than the proportion of residents, so attention should be drawn to the y-axis scale

This data can be found in the accompanying ‘COVID-19 and flu vaccination statistics, March 2024: data tables’ on the Adult social care in England, monthly statistics: March 2024 page, in addition to data by region and local authority.

Visiting in care homes

In the week ending 14 February 2024, 99.8% of care homes in England were able to accommodate residents receiving visitors. This figure has been stable since September 2022.

Figure 4: percentage of care homes accommodating or limiting visits for residents, England, 4 January 2022 to 14 February 2024

The proportion of care homes accommodating visiting for residents has broadly increased since mid January 2022 with the exception of slight decreases in early April 2022 and early July 2022. This number has stabilised since September 2022.

Source: Capacity Tracker

Note: the dotted lines in this chart represent the implementation of the changes in care home visiting guidance or changes to the visiting question in Capacity Tracker:

• A: from 31 January 2022, no limits on the number of named visitors, with testing and guidance to support safe visiting in place
• B: from 4 April 2022, no restrictions on visitation in care homes. Every care home resident should have one visitor who can visit in all circumstances (including during periods of isolation and outbreak)
• C: from 4 July 2022, the visiting questions in Capacity Tracker changed so care homes were asked whether residents had been allowed visits in or out of the care home in the last month, instead of in the last 7 days
• D: from 31 July 2022, providers are mandated to submit data on visiting on a monthly basis. From August 2022 onwards, the data points in this graph are monthly instead of weekly

This data can be found in Table 1 of the accompanying ‘Occupancy, visiting and workforce statistics, March 2024: data tables’ on the Adult social care in England, monthly statistics: March 2024 page, in addition to data by region and local authority.

Staff absences due to COVID-19

In the week ending 14 February 2024, 0.2% of care home staff and 0.4% of domiciliary care staff were absent due to COVID-19-related reasons.

These proportions stayed the same for both care home staff and domiciliary care staff in the last month.

Figure 5: percentage of staff absent due to COVID-19-related reasons, England, 4 January 2022 to 14 February 2024

Since the peak of 2.9% in January 2022, there have been 2 further spikes in care home staff absence rates, in late March 2022 and mid July 2022. For domiciliary care absence, following a peak of 4.8% in January 2022, there have been a further 3 spikes, in late March 2022, mid July 2022 and mid October 2022.

From November 2022 to April 2023, absence rates due to COVID-19-related reasons remained broadly stable in both care homes and domiciliary care settings, and decreased between April and June 2023. Since June 2023, absence rates have remained the same among care home staff. Between June and October 2023, absence rates broadly increased among domiciliary care staff and decreased in November 2023. Since November 2023, absence rates among domiciliary care staff have remained the same.

Source: Capacity Tracker

Notes:

• the proportion of staff absent due to COVID-19-related reasons is not comparable across care settings
• the dotted line in these charts represents the move to monthly reporting after the start of the mandatory data provision implemented on 31 July 2022. From August 2022 onwards, the data points in these graphs are monthly instead of weekly

This data can be found in tables 2 and 3 of the accompanying ‘Occupancy, visiting and workforce statistics, March 2024: data tables’ on the Adult social care in England, monthly statistics: March 2024 page, in addition to data by region and local authority.

Official statistics in development: client level data

On 31 December 2023, there were 640,940 people receiving long-term local authority commissioned adult social care:

• 466,720 people were receiving support in the community
• 130,475 people were receiving support in the residential care homes
• 51,490 people were receiving support in nursing homes
• 230 people were receiving support in prison

Notes:

• values given are rounded to the nearest 5
• people may be receiving long-term support in multiple settings
• statistics do not include the Isles of Scilly for the whole timeseries and Rochdale for values between October and December 2023

The total number of people receiving long-term support in England showed an increase from 623,650 on 30 April 2023 to 642,645 on 30 November 2023. It then fell to 640,940 on 31 December 2023.

This trend is driven by the increase in support delivered in community settings, where the number of people receiving long-term support increased from 449,320 on 30 April 2023 to 466,720 on 31 December 2023. The reported increase could be partly due to improved reporting by some local authorities. It may also be the result of seasonal patterns in long-term support provision.

Figure 6: number of people receiving local authority commissioned long-term adult social care support at the end of the month, England, by support setting from 30 April 2023 to 31 December 2023

Source: client level data collection.

The data used in Figure 6 can be found in Table 1 of the accompanying ‘Long-term support statistics, March 2024: data tables’ on the Adult social care in England, monthly statistics: March 2024 page.

Further analysis

Occupancy in care homes

As of the week ending 14 February 2024:

• 85.7% of beds in care homes were occupied
• 11.2% of beds in care homes were vacant and admittable
• 3.1% of beds in care homes were vacant and non-admittable

There was some regional variation. The percentage of beds occupied in care homes varied from 82.4% in the East Midlands to 87.7% in London. The percentage of beds in care homes that were vacant and admittable varied from 8.4% in the North West to 14.5% in the East Midlands. The percentage of beds in care homes that were vacant and non-admittable varied from 2.4% in the North East to 4.1% in the North West.

Data on occupancy and response rates can be found in tables 4 and 8 of the accompanying ‘Occupancy, visiting and workforce statistics, March 2024: data tables’ on the Adult social care in England, monthly statistics: March 2024 page.

For more information, see ‘Adult social care in England statistics: background quality and methodology’.

COVID-19 vaccinations in older adult care homes

For full response rates, see the accompanying ‘COVID-19 and flu vaccination response rates, March 2024: data tables’ on the Adult social care in England, monthly statistics: March 2024 page.

Residents of older adult care homes

Data on COVID-19 primary course and autumn booster vaccinations among residents in older adult care homes is published by NHS England on the NHS COVID-19 vaccinations page.

Staff of older adult care homes

As of the week ending 18 February 2024, in older adult care homes 83.8% of staff have been reported to have received a full primary course and 10.1% have been reported to have received an autumn booster.

COVID-19 vaccinations in younger adult care homes and domiciliary care settings

The following proportions of social care staff and residents have been reported to have received their COVID-19 vaccination doses.

Residents of younger adult care homes

Data on COVID-19 primary course and autumn booster vaccinations for residents of younger adult care homes is published by NHS England on the NHS COVID-19 vaccinations page.

Staff of younger adult care homes

For younger adult care home staff, as of the week ending 18 February 2024, 81.7% of staff have been reported to have received a full primary course and 9.2% have been reported to have received an autumn booster.

Domiciliary care staff

For domiciliary care staff, as of the week ending 18 February 2024, 79.7% of staff have been reported to have received a full primary course and 9.0% have been reported to have received an autumn booster.

As data is self-reported by care providers, COVID-19 vaccination rates are affected by response rates.

For full response rates, see the accompanying ‘COVID-19 and flu vaccination response rates, March 2024: data tables’ on the Adult social care in England, monthly statistics: March 2024 page.

For more information, see ‘Adult social care in England statistics: background quality and methodology’.

Flu vaccination in adult social care settings

The proportions of providers that have provided data on the number of staff or residents who received a flu vaccination for the 2023 to 2024 season, as of 18 February 2024 were:

• 99.2% of older adult care home providers
• 98.9% of younger adult care home providers
• 97.3% of domiciliary care providers

For full response rates, see the accompanying ‘COVID-19 and flu vaccination response rates, March 2024: data tables’ on the Adult social care in England, monthly statistics: March 2024 page.

As of the week ending 18 February 2024, the proportions of those who had received a flu vaccination in care settings were:

• 64.2% of residents in older adult care homes
• 9.9% of all staff in older adult care homes
• 51.3% of residents in younger adult care homes
• 9.1% of all staff in younger adult care homes
• 9.5% of staff who work in domiciliary care settings

There is regional variation in reported flu vaccination uptake among each of the adult social care groups. The variation is most pronounced among residents of younger adult care homes with 45.1% uptake in the South East and 56.5% uptake in Yorkshire and the Humber.

For more information, see ‘Adult social care in England statistics: background quality and methodology’.

Accommodating COVID-safe visitation in care homes

In the week ending 14 February 2024:

• 99.8% of care homes in England were able to accommodate visits in or out of the care home for residents in all circumstances during the last month. This proportion has increased slightly since the week ending 15 January 2024, when 99.7% of care homes were able to accommodate visits. This proportion has shown little variation since September 2022
• a further 0.1% were able to accommodate visits in exceptional circumstances. This is the same as in the week ending 15 January 2024. In October 2023, there was a reduction in the number of care homes reporting that they were only allowing visiting in exceptional circumstances. This was as a result of a data exercise to improve data quality. This figure has broadly declined since April 2022. Exceptional circumstances are individually defined by each care home but are generally thought to be considered when residents are palliative

Regional variation has steadily decreased over the past year as more and more providers are able to accommodate visitation across all regions.

Since 31 July 2022, this question is part of the subset of data that providers are mandated to submit on a monthly basis. For more information, see ‘Adult social care in England statistics: background quality and methodology’.

Adult social care workforce

In care homes

Absence rates in care homes stayed the same over the last month. In the week ending 14 February 2024, 0.2% of care home staff were absent due to COVID-19-related reasons.

Care home staff absence related to COVID-19 reached a peak of 2.9% in the week ending 11 January 2022 and has remained below 1.0% since August 2022.

In the week ending 14 February 2024, there was little regional variation, with COVID-19-related staff absence rates ranging between 0.1% and 0.2% across all regions. Since the week ending 15 January 2024, absence rates remained the same in all regions, with the exception of London, the North East, the South East, the South West and the West Midlands, where absence rates decreased from 0.2% to 0.1%, 0.2% to 0.1%, 0.3% to 0.2%, 0.3% to 0.2% and 0.2% to 0.1% respectively.

Data on absences and response rates can be found in tables 2 and 6, respectively, of the accompanying ‘Occupancy, visiting and workforce statistics, March 2024: data tables’ on the Adult social care in England, monthly statistics: March 2024 page.

In domiciliary care

Absence rates in domiciliary care settings are not directly comparable with those in residential care homes.

Absence rates in domiciliary care stayed the same over the last month. In the week ending 14 February 2024, 0.4% of domiciliary care staff were absent due to COVID-19 reasons.

In the week ending 14 February 2024, there was some regional variation, with regions reporting absence rates between 0.2% and 0.7%. Since the week ending 15 January 2024, absence rates increased from 0.4% to 0.6% in the East Midlands, 0.2% to 0.4% in London and 0.5% to 0.7% in Yorkshire and the Humber. Absence rates decreased from 0.4% to 0.3% in the East of England, 0.4% to 0.2% in the North West, 0.5% to 0.4% in the South West and 0.4% to 0.3% in the West Midlands. Absence rates remained the same in all other regions.

Data on absences and response rates can be found in tables 3 and 7 of the accompanying ‘Occupancy, visiting and workforce statistics, March 2024: data tables’ on the Adult social care in England, monthly statistics: March 2024 page.

For more information, see Adult social care in England statistics: background quality and methodology.

Official statistics in development: client level data

Ethnicity

White people of English, Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish or British background were the largest ethnic group in receipt of long-term support. As of 31 December 2023, 492,995 people identifying as this ethnicity were receiving long-term support.

The next largest group in receipt of long-term support were white people of any background except English, Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish, British, Irish, Gypsy, Irish Traveller or Roma backgrounds, accounting for 19,795 people on 31 December 2023. The third largest ethnic group was black people of Caribbean background, of whom 14,315 people were receiving long-term support on 31 December 2023.

There were 35,685 people recorded with undeclared or unknown ethnicity and 2,585 people who refused to declare their ethnicity, of those receiving long-term support on 31 December 2023.

Gender

Of those receiving long-term support on 31 December 2023:

• 361,460 people identified themselves female
• 278,705 people identified themselves male
• 275 people identified themselves as another gender
• 885 people did not have a recorded gender

Age group

CLD allows for the most detailed insight to date into the age distribution of people interacting with the local authority adult social care system.

Of those receiving long-term support on 31 December 2023, the 3 largest age groups were:

• people aged 85 to 94, with 134,805 people
• people aged 75 to 84, with 134,795 people
• people aged 45 to 64, with 133,195 people

Note: the age groupings used in this publication vary in size and numbers are not population-standardised.

Among all age groups, support is most commonly provided in community settings. For all age groups except people aged 95 and above, there was an increase in the number of people receiving long-term support in the community from 30 April 2023 to 31 December 2023.

Figure 7: number of people receiving local authority commissioned long-term adult social care support in the community at the end of the month, England, by age group, from 30 April 2023 to 31 December 2023

Source: client level data collection.

The data used in Figure 7 can be found in Table 4 of the accompanying ‘Long-term support statistics, March 2024: data tables’ on the Adult social care in England, monthly statistics: March 2024 page.

Region and local authority

The published figures are provided by local authority, by age group (18 to 64, 65 and over) and by support setting to enable direct comparison  with SALT figures (LTS001b). The Local Government Association and the CLD reference group have confirmed that the data is now of high enough quality to make this a reliable metric.

On 31 December 2023, the 3 English regions with the largest number of people receiving long-term support were:

• London: 97,600 people
• South East: 95,525 people
• North West: 95,435 people

All regions had a small reported increase in the number of people receiving long-term support from 30 April to 31 December 2023 except West Midlands which reported a small decrease. This may be due to a lack of coverage in some local authorities in West Midlands.

Figure 8: number of people receiving local authority commissioned long-term adult social care support at the end of the month, England, by region, from 30 April 2023 to 31 December 2023

Source: client level data collection.

The data used in Figure 8 can be found in Table 6 of the accompanying ‘Long-term support statistics, March 2024: data tables’ on the Adult social care in England, monthly statistics: March 2024 page.

At local authority level, figures and any apparent trends should be interpreted with caution, since we are aware that some local authorities do not have complete coverage and have known data quality issues that they have improved over time and are working to resolve for future submissions.

Six local authorities (4%) appear to have lower reported (less than 80%) coverage of long-term support in CLD, based on a comparison of the CLD figure for 30 April 2023 to the figure submitted in their SALT 2022 to 2023 return under LTS001b - the number of long-term service users as of 31 March 2023.

Terminology

Care home

Facilities providing residential care. The data in this bulletin refers to Care Quality Commission (CQC) registered care homes.

Older adult care homes

Care homes serving any older people (aged 65 and over) as identified from the latest CQC data on care homes in the ‘older people service’ user band. A small number of residents within care homes serving older people may be aged under 65.

Younger adult care homes

Care homes not serving any older people (aged 65 and over) as identified from the latest CQC data on care homes in the ‘older people service’ user band.

Domiciliary care

Services providing personal care for people living in their own homes. The data in this bulletin refers to domiciliary staff employed by independent CQC-registered providers.

Staff

Unless specified, staff can refer to staff directly employed by a provider and/or through an agency.

Vacant and admittable beds

Beds which are vacant and available to accept an admission on the day of data submission, as self-reported by care providers in Capacity Tracker.

Vacant and non-admittable beds

Beds which are vacant but not available for admission on the day of data submission, as self-reported by care providers in Capacity Tracker. This includes the number of beds which are vacant and reserved.

About this data

These statistics are being published as a part of a wider landscape of statistics on adult social care. The Government Statistical Service compiles a UK adult social care database of official statistics on adult social care across the 4 nations of the UK. This is updated on a monthly basis.

The UK Statistics Authority conducted a review of adult social care statistics in England, which called for:

• better leadership and collaboration across different organisations publishing official statistics. This publication has been produced in collaboration with other statistics providers of COVID-19 adult social care data and DHSC will endeavour to work with various stakeholders as more data is published through this publication
• addressing of gaps in available data, particularly in privately funded care. This bulletin aims to plug some of that gap by including data on residents privately funding their care in addition to those funded by local authorities
• improving existing official statistics. Statistics derived from Capacity Tracker are badged as official statistics and more data will be added iteratively based on user needs

Data sources

Data on occupancy and visiting in care homes, staff absence and vaccinations is taken from self-reported data submitted by care providers in England through a data collection and insight tool called Capacity Tracker. From 31 July 2022, this data is part of the subset of data that providers are mandated to submit on a monthly basis.

Statistics on long-term service users are taken from the CLD collection, a data collection on local authority adult social care activity. This has been a mandatory collection from April 2023.

More detailed information about data sources can be found in Adult social care in England statistics: background quality and methodology. This document also includes detailed information on:

• data coverage
• data quality
• relevance
• accuracy and reliability
• timeliness and punctuality
• comparability and coherence
• accessibility and clarity
• cost and burden

Revisions

Any revisions to past publications will be in line with DHSC’s revision policy and highlighted in future publications accordingly.