Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent steps his Department has taken to ensure effective (a) research, (b) data gathering and (c) quality assurance in the social care sector.

Through the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), the Department funds high quality, timely research that benefits the National Health Service, public health and social care. Supporting social care research is a priority for the NIHR, which welcomes research applications on social care topics.

We are committed to transforming how social care data is collected, shared and used. ‘Care data matters’ published in February 2023, sets out our roadmap for achieving this. As part of this, we are streamlining and improving existing data collections and establishing data collections to bridge data gaps. This includes better linking health and care data through a new person-level data collection Client Level Data, which became mandatory for all local authorities on 1 April 2023, and improving access to social care data nationally.

The Health and Care Act 2022 includes provisions for the Care Quality Commission to assess the performance of local authorities’ delivery of their adult social care duties, as set out under part one of the Care Act 2014.