1. In relation to adult social care services in the community, how many new providers signed a contract for personal care services in 2023, and January to March 2024?
19 in 2023 and 0 between January and March 2024.
2. How many hours were they commissioned for?
135901 in 2023. There were no new providers commissioned between January and March 2024, therefore there were no hours.
3. What was the total payment to those providers?
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 data in the way it is requested, ie we do not specifically record new providers. In order to identify new providers, a manual check of every monthly report would be required. The Council currently has 16,818 agreements under this request, which would have to be multiplied by 12 months. It would take 10 minutes to individually check each invoice to identify and extract the requested information, this would take well in excess of the 18 hour appropriate limit.
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.
4. In 2023, how many hours of personal care were commissioned via direct payments, and how many directly to regulated providers?
The function of direct payments provides recipients with choice and control over expenditure for their own care. As such, the Council does not record this data.
1,583,003 commissioned directly to regulated providers.
5. What was the total spend for each?
The Council does not hold information via calendar year. In the financial year 2023/24 the total spend on direct payments was £16,523,341, and the approximate spend on all personal care was £55,597,343.
6. How many safeguarding referrals were received for suspected abuse in 2023?
6,976
7. How many were related to unregulated care providers/personal assistants/micro-providers?
8. How many were related to regulated care providers?
Compliance with the two requests above 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. In order to find and retrieve this information, a manual check of the text fields in our safeguarding data would be required. It would take approximately 10 minutes per referral to see if this information has been recorded and then to cross reference it against our provider and Care Quality Commission data.
In the interests of providing advice and assistance, the Council can state that there were 1,945 referrals marked with the source of risk as “service provider”.
9. How many were upheld? Please breakdown into unregulated care providers/personal assistants/micro-providers and regulated care providers.
Compliance with this requests above 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. In order to find and retrieve this information, a manual check of the text fields in our safeguarding data would be required. It would take approximately 10 minutes per referral to see if this information has been recorded and then to cross reference it against our provider and Care Quality Commission data.
In the interests of providing advice and assistance, the Council can state that there were 1,383 referrals that went to enquiry. Of those, 256 were marked with the source of risk as “service provider”.