Adult social care contributing £38 billion and 1.5 million jobs to English economy

Adult social care employers contribute £38.5 billion to the English economy according to a new report published today.

‘The Economic Value of the Adult Social Care Sector – England’ report was commissioned by Skills for Care and Development who wanted to find out the extent of the economic impact of a growing sector offering services in more than 40,000 sites across England creating 1.5 million job roles.

The first step in determining the sector’s economic contribution was identifying the Gross Value Added (GVA) directly generated by employers including wages paid to workers filling the many different job roles in adult social care (£20.3billion).

In addition to measuring the direct impact two further measures were used to estimate the total GVA generated by the sector. The first of these of these was the indirect approach which estimates the GVA created by the sector in its supply chain by purchasing services from other sectors of the economy that might include cleaning services or food suppliers to parts of the sector (£8.9 billion).

The other was the induced impact of the sector that results from those who are employed directly in the sector and those employed indirectly spending their wages in other sectors of the economy  (£9.3 billion).

These three measures of GVA – the direct, indirect and induced – were then combined to give a total spend of £38.5 billion across England.

As well as estimating the GVA created by the sector the report also examines the numbers of job roles it supports which totalled 1.5 million, or 962,000 million full time equivalents.

Commenting on the England report Skills for Care CEO Sharon Allen (pictured) said: “With a growing workforce that is bigger than the NHS we are not surprised at how much our sector contributes to the English economy. This report’s real strength is that it provides evidence about what we have always believed anecdotally about the significant economic contribution made by a sector that provides 6% of total employment in England.

“The findings in this report underline the importance of social care not only as a provider of services to our fellow citizens when they most need it, but our vital role as a provider of jobs in local economies across the country where much of the money is spent.”

The board of Skills for Care & Development brings together Skills for Care (in England); the Scottish Social Services Council, the Northern Ireland Social Care Council and Social Care Wales to create a robust economic profile for adult social care in the UK. The board agreed there was a clear need for a robust report into the economic contribution of the sector across the UK and commissioned experienced consultants ICF to write an independent report.

Skills for Care & Development was established in 2002 as the UK Sector Skills Council for people working in early years, children and young people’s services, and those working in social work and social care for adults and children in the UK.

Click here to download a copy of the report.