25 Feb 2021

New figures on the adult social care workforce in local authorities are released

The latest statistics on adult social care staff employed by local authorities in England have been published today by NHS Digital.

Personal Social Services: Staff of Social Services Departments, England 2020¹ covers the 114,100 jobs in local authorities in adult social care services – accounting for approximately 6.9% of the total adult social care workforce in England.

Most of the measures are snapshots as at 30 September 2020. These include:

The number of local authority adult social care jobs by job role and employer type
The proportion of jobs with zero-hour contracts, by job role group
Demographic data of staff such as gender, age, ethnicity and pay
The average number of hours per week which are worked by adult social care staff within local authorities

Some measures cover the period October 2019 to September 2020, including:

Average number of sick days taken by adult social care staff in local authorities

The report does not include information on staff employed in the independent sector (private and voluntary) or children's social services departments. This is published separately by the Department for Education.

ENDS

Read the full report

Personal Social Services: Staff of Social Services Departments, England 2020

Contact Information

NHS England Media Team
0300 303 3888
media@nhsdigital.nhs.net

Notes to editors

This report uses data collected by the Adult Social Care Workforce Data Set (ASC-WDS), which went live in August 2019. It was previously known as the National Minimum Data Set for Social Care (NMDS-SC) which was introduced in 2011. This collection is managed by Skills for Care (SfC) on behalf of the Department of Health and Social Care and has been collecting information about social care providers and their staff since early 2006. Following an open National Statistics consultation, it was decided that the NMDS-SC would replace the Personal Social Services Staff of Social Services Departments’ return SSDS001 from September 2011 as the adult workforce data return for local authorities. The data in this report is therefore not directly comparable with SSDS001 and so comparisons are not made to data prior to 2011 in this report. For more information regarding this, see the Data Quality report that accompanies this publication.

For media enquiries please email nhsengland.media@nhs.net or call 0300 30 33 888.