1. Does the council have a preferred agency/agencies for the supply of temporary staff within social care?
Yes.
2. What is the council’s process in reviewing/appointing preferred agencies?
The contract was awarded via the MSTAR Framework.
3. Excluding care at home and domiciliary care, what was the council’s total spend on agency staff in 2022/23 and 2023/24? Please break down into adults and childrens social care
| Year | Adults | Childrens |
| 2022/23 | £1.58m | £16.29m |
| 2023/24 | £1.09m | £15.47m |
4. What was the total spent on agency Nurses (excluding care at home/domiciliary care) in 2022/23 and 2023/24?
£0 for both years.
5. Please provide a list of the care settings where agency staff were provided via funding from Devon County Council over the past 12 months
Compliance with this request would exceed the appropriate cost limit under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 which is £450 or 18 hours of officer time. The Council does not hold this information in a reportable form. In order to find and retrieve the requested information, the Council would need to identify and contact individual managers and team leaders to ascertain which agency was used. Each agency would then need to be searched for on a system to retrieve a reference number, and the invoices matched on another system for each different agency used, in every single care home.
Under the Act, there is a duty to provide advice and assistance as to how a request can be refined to fit within the appropriate limit. Unfortunately, due to the way the data is held this is not possible for this request. The Council advises contacting individual care settings to gather the requested information.