Evidencing the outsourcing of social care provision in England

This project will create a centralised, longitudinal data resource of existing datasets that will enable investigation of the impact of outsourcing social care provision in England.

Why this project is important

The social care sector in England promotes the outsourcing of children’s and adult social care to private providers.

Supporters of this model claim that the marketisation of social care fosters competition and reduces the inefficiencies of a state monopoly. However, research suggests that private providers perform less well than their non-profit and public counterparts. Nevertheless, the promise of reduced costs and improved services makes outsourcing appealing to policymakers, and more so during periods of austerity.

Regulating and improving the sector is made difficult by a lack of information on the impact and degree to which local authorities (LAs) have outsourced their services.

What the research will involve

The research team will create a novel longitudinal data resource of routinely collected data on providers, commissioners, and service users of children and adult social care. Separate datasets will be produced for adult and children’s social care, spanning the duration for which the data is available, likely to cover at least 10 years (2012 to present).

The datasets will combine data on:

• Ofsted and CQC inspection ratings of individual social care providers and local authorities
• Additional quality of care outcomes, including, but not limited to: placement locality, mental health, health outcomes, user satisfaction, and complaints  
• Provider characteristics (e.g. ownership, chain affiliation and size, staffing, and client capacity)
• Area deprivation
• Area demographics (e.g. composition of resident age, ethnicity, and urban/rural population)
• LA income (e.g. collected council tax and user fees)
• Social care expenditure
• Demand and supply of social care services
• Workforce data including use of agency workers, turnover rates, and (for children’s social care) social worker caseloads.

How will this project make a difference?

The dataset will provide an empirical foundation to inform key policy debates on the future provision of social care and further research.

The findings will be summarised in a publicly available report, which will explain how stakeholders can access and use the data. The report will also present descriptive analyses, mapping and visualising overall time trends of key variables.