Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what proportion of the costs of social care are funded by the adult social care precept charged by local authorities.

The total value of the precept each year includes all the annual increases set by councils since 2016/17, and the Government does not publish this total. We cannot therefore calculate the proportion of adult social care spend each year funded from the precept. However, the Government publishes the amount raised by the increase in the adult social care precept each year. In 2023/24, councils could increase the precept by up to 2%, raising an estimated maximum of £561 million.

The evidence review for Adult Social Care Reform, published in December 2021, estimated that up to 70% of total adult social care spend is from public sources.

The impact of the social care precept varies across the country, depending upon the decisions that local authorities make about how much precept to levy and how much it needs to spend on adult social care.