Broadly, our approach aimed to allocate actual spending on adult social care, using data from NHS Digital, to people on the Living Costs and Food (LCF) dataset. The LCF collects information on spending patterns and the cost of living that reflect household budgets. It is conducted throughout the year, across the whole of the UK, and is the most significant survey on household spending in the UK. Only data for England is available, requiring further work to gross up to a UK total, and the survey does not cover people living in institutional households, such as residential care homes and prisons.
Our preferred approach would have been to adopt an insurance-based allocation, similar to the method used to allocate NHS spending. The nature of adult social care provision makes this more complicated. Unlike health care, social care services in the UK are not provided free of charge for everyone. In England, local authorities provide assistance to adults who have insufficient financial means to fund their own use of care services. The consequence of the means-tested arrangement for adult social care funding is that detailed information on people’s assets is required to understand which people are not covered under an insurance-style allocation. Unfortunately, the LCF does not currently contain the required level of detail to estimate the value of household assets. As such, we recommended a hybrid approach where 20% of adult social care is allocated via an insurance approach and 80% via estimated consumption.
The LCF does not currently contain any information on whether a respondent has been a recipient of adult social care provision. Therefore, the consumption element of adult social care spending is allocated to individuals based on the LCF, according to whether they receive any of the following: Attendance Allowance, Incapacity Benefit, Carer’s Allowance, Severe Disablement Allowance, or Disability Living Allowance.
