Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what the average cost of an elderly residential care home is in the (a) private and (b) public sector.

The average costs in an elderly residential care home in the private and public sector are below

- Residential care for age 65+, external provision: £534 per week in 2015/16;

- Residential care for age 65+, in house provision: £789 per week in 2015/16; and

- The data suggests that only 5.7% of local authority funded age 65+ residential care weeks were in in-house facilities.

The source is:

http://www.content.digital.nhs.uk/catalogue/PUB22240

The Department does not hold any data on average life expectancy of elderly residents in care homes – however the Department does hold published data on a resident’s length of stay in a care home where a service user’s stay ends due to their death. While this is occasionally used as a measure for life expectancy, this does not record stays for individuals in care homes where their stay ended because they moved from one home to another.

The statistics show that the average length of stay in a single residential care home in England that ended in a service users’ death was around 26 months, although this statistic does not include any previous stays in other homes.

The published source is:

http://www.pssru.ac.uk/archive/pdf/3211.pdf