Dear Ed,

Following the introduction of digital social care records (DSCR), we have made several changes to our adult social care statistics over the past year. Most recently, following user consultation, we have split client level data statistics into a separate official statistics in development release, while changing frequency of the more mature provider statistics.

These provider statistics are based on data collected directly from care providers through the Capacity Tracker tool. This collection, which began in early 2021, has developed into a robust and stable source.

Our developments include expanding the range of metrics reported in the publication, such as the number of people receiving regulated domiciliary care, the number of care home residents at national, regional and local authority level, and occupancy in care homes. We have introduced new national-level estimates of the proportion of care users in England with a DSCR and estimates of the proportion of providers in England who are in the process of implementing a DSCR.

We have strengthened reproducibility and quality assurance for the end-to-end process of producing these statistics, including development of reproducible analytical pipelines (RAPs) and the use of GitHub version control, to bring these in line with best practice standards of the Code of Practice for Statistics.

We believe these developments have significantly enhanced the value, granularity and quality of the statistics.

In accordance with Section 12(1) of the Statistics and Registration Act 2007, we would welcome a full assessment of these statistics given their continued high profile and considering these developments. We feel that the start of a new quarterly series is a good time to undertake the assessment, with a view to designation as Accredited Official Statistics.

We are copying this letter to our adult social care statistics team who are ready to pick up the next steps with the OSR team.

Yours sincerely

Andrea Prophet

Deputy Director, Statistics & Data Science and Head of Profession for Statistics