Guidance

Annex B: cost of care reports contents

Updated 27 September 2024

Applies to England

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Following an announcement by the Chancellor of the Exchequer on 29 July 2024, the planned adult social care charging reforms, which were inherited from the previous government, will not be taken forward in October 2025.

Separate cost of care exercise reports (PDFs/Microsoft Word files) should be submitted for age 65+ care homes and age 18+ domiciliary care.

Each report should set out how the cost of care estimates presented in Annex A, Section 3 was arrived at. The care home report should include but not be limited to the following contents:

  • the response rate of the exercise, as a percentage of those invited (excluding providers for whom the exercise turned out not to be relevant) and they engaged with the market
  • justification of the proposed approach to return on capital and return on operations
  • one table for each service type, with each showing the count of observations, lower quartile, median and upper quartile (where relevant) of all items in Annex A, Section 3
  • the full table in Annex A, Section 3 with one column of median values for each care type
  • a clear statement of when the results were collected (the base price year) and how they will be uplifted in future for inflation. Local authorities may wish to assign a relevant inflation index to each costing line, such as the consumer price index[footnote 1], average earnings, the National Living Wage and so on
  • a full description of the questions asked/template used as part of the exercise

The domiciliary care report should include but not be limited to the following contents:

  • the response rate of the exercise, as a percentage of those invited (excluding providers for whom the exercise turned out not to be relevant)
  • the lower quartile/median/upper quartile of number of appointments per week by visit length (15/30/45/60 mins)
  • justification of the proposed approach to return on operations
  • one table for each care type, with each showing the count of observations, lower quartile, median and upper quartile (where relevant) of all items in Annex A, Section 3
  • the full table in Annex A, Section 3, with one column of median values for each care type
  • consistent with the identified cost per contact hour, the cost per visit for each of 15, 30, 45 and 60 minute visits (shorter visits have larger relative travel times so cost relatively more)
  • a clear statement of when the results were collected (the base price year) and how they will be uplifted in future for inflation. Local authorities may wish to assign a relevant inflation index to each costing line, such as the consumer price index[footnote 1], average earnings, the National Living Wage and so on
  • a full description of the questions asked/template used as part of the exercise

  1. Consumer Price Index including owner occupied housing (CPIH). This owner-occupied housing CPI variant is relevant because some care home costs are similar to housing costs. ↩ ↩2

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