Following publication of the 2024 to 2025 statistics, an inconsistency was reported to the Department of Health and Social Care by one of the local authorities. Data on mental capacity provided by Devon County Council (912) was misclassified, with the numbers incorrectly transposed between:

concluded section 42 enquiries where the adult at risk lacked capacity to make decisions relating to these enquiries
concluded section 42 enquiries where the adult at risk did not lack capacity to make decisions relating to these enquiries

As a result, cases in which support was provided by an advocate, family member or friend for adults who lacked capacity were incorrectly recorded as a subset of enquiries involving adults who did not lack capacity.

It is not currently possible to correct the figures due to limited availability of the underlying data. Care should be taken when analysing table 7 of the published ODS data tables and CSV tables for table SG3a for Devon County Council, the South West region, County and England.

This statistical release contains findings from the safeguarding adults collection (SAC) for the period 1 April 2024 to 31 March 2025. The SAC is a mandatory data collection from local authorities in England. Safeguarding adults is a statutory duty for councils with adult social services responsibilities (CASSRs) in England under the Care Act 2014 to safeguard vulnerable adults from abuse or neglect. The data is collected directly from these councils.

This publication consists of:

a statistical commentary on the data from 2024 to 2025
associated data tables (in ODS format) providing:
- data at local authority, regional and national level
- a data quality assessment, including data completeness and integrity measures
data tables in CSV format
a background, quality and methodology document
the safeguarding adults dashboard (a Power BI dashboard (an interactive business intelligence tool))
a pre-release access list

For the CSV, ‘View online’ will only show the first 1,000 rows of data. To view the full data, download and open the CSV file.

Official statistics on safeguarding adults prior to 2024 to 2025 were previously published by NHS England.

Published 27 November 2025

Last updated 25 March 2026 show all updates

25 March 2026
Added correction note to landing page, methodology document and table 7 of the data tables spreadsheet to note that there is a misclassification in the data on mental capacity provided by Devon County Council.
17 December 2025
Updated the statistical commentary to correct a figure in the 'main points' section: the proportion of concluded section 42 enquiries where a risk was identified and the reported outcome was that the risk was reduced or removed was corrected from 91.1% to 91.2%. The data tables are unaffected.
27 November 2025
Added link to safeguarding adults dashboard.
27 November 2025
First published.

Safeguarding adults, England, 2024 to 2025

Applies to England

Documents