Half of it is spent on working-age adults. Almost nobody expects that.
The service that decides whether hospital beds free up, whether families cope, and whether old age is survivable on an ordinary income. Nearly half of it is spent on working-age adults, which almost nobody expects.
10 figures, each with its official source.
Long-term support arranged or provided by a local authority. It excludes everyone paying for their own care privately, and everyone whose needs did not meet the threshold.
People who received an assessment having not had long-term council support in the previous twelve months, about 1,330 per 100,000 adults in England. An assessment is not an offer of care.
Up £2.3bn, or 9%, in cash terms and 3% after inflation. The largest area of council spending after education, and the reason council finances and care quality are the same story.
Up 8% from £23.0bn. The gap between gross and net is what councils recover from the people receiving care and from the NHS, which is why both numbers get quoted and they are not contradictory.
48% of councils' external income for adult social care, and up 14% in one year, the fastest-rising source. This is the means test in pounds: care is the part of the welfare state people are still charged for.
45% of external income, up 4%. Money moving from health to care, which is cheaper than the hospital bed it avoids.
A vacancy rate of 6.2%, the lowest since 2015-16, down from 7.0% and 108,000 posts a year earlier, and well below the 10.6% recorded in 2022-23. A sector body's workforce survey rather than an official statistic, and the recognised source for this measure.
Three consecutive years of improvement, and the rate is still roughly triple the rest of the economy. Both halves of that sentence are true and most coverage carries only one of them.
404,000 over ten years before the sector grows at all. With additional demand of 281,300 on top, total demand to 2035 is about 685,000 workers. No published plan reaches that number.