Using data to plan the future of adult social care

Adult social care faces a familiar but intensifying set of pressures: rising and changing demand, workforce shortages, fragile provider markets, financial constraint and increasing expectations around assurance and reform. For councils, the challenge is both responding well to today's pressures and understanding what communities will need next.That requires more than retrospective reporting. It requires shared intelligence infrastructure – the ability to connect population change, care need, workforce capacity, market sustainability and quality assurance so that local government can plan earlier, act collectively and make better-informed decisions.Across the West Midlands, the WM-ADASS Adult Social Care Data Hub is helping councils do exactly that. Part of our Improvement for All Programme, the Hub brings together adult social care data, dashboards and benchmarking tools in one place. Its growth to more than 1,500 active users from councils across England reflects a national appetite for practical intelligence, not simply more data.Our ambition is to help councils answer some of the most important strategic questions facing adult social care. Where are workforce shortages likely to emerge? Which roles are harder to recruit and retain? Which markets are vulnerable? And where should investment be targeted?We have already seen what this can achieve. The International Recruitment Dashboard, developed in the West Midlands and now used more widely across England, has helped councils identify risks, including provider pressure and sponsor licence revocations. It has supported continuity of care, responses for displaced international care workers and national conversations about how risks can be identified and mitigated earlier.The Memorandum of Commitment work on agency staffing with West Midlands Employers provides another example. Bringing agency workforce data into the Hub has given councils greater visibility of agency use, costs, compliance and workforce movement. It has also demonstrated impact, including reduced agency dependency, increased movement into permanent roles and an estimated £10.6m in avoided costs during the first phase.These examples matter because they show what councils can achieve when intelligence is organised around practical decisions. They also reduce duplication by allowing councils to work from a shared evidence base while applying insight locally.The next phase is to move further from description to prediction. Through the Skills for Care Workforce Strategy Impact Fund, we now have the opportunity to develop the Hub beyond a reporting and benchmarking platform into an integrated, predictive decision-support tool.Our ambition is to help councils answer some of the most important strategic questions facing adult social care. Where are workforce shortages likely to emerge? Which roles are harder to recruit and retain? Which markets are vulnerable? And where should investment be targeted?To support this, we want to bring together workforce intelligence with market, commissioning, Care Quality Commission, demographic and population data. Working with partners, including the University of Birmingham, we aim to develop a clearer understanding of future workforce demand and capacity over the next five, 10 and 15 years. This will help councils move beyond reacting to pressure and towards anticipating it, so that risks and opportunities can be identified earlier.Crucially, this is not only a technical exercise. A dashboard has value only if people have the confidence to interpret it and use it. Alongside developing the Hub, we are investing in data literacy and practical learning for analysts, managers and leaders, so that insight informs real decisions about people, places, services and markets.Co-production is also central to our approach. We are working with councils, practitioners, researchers, providers and people with lived experience to shape how data and insight are developed and used. This ensures our questions reflect what matters to people and communities, and that insight is accessible and useful.For the West Midlands, the opportunity is to build a stronger shared intelligence capability across all 14 councils, helping us anticipate pressure, target support and make better-informed decisions about workforce and market sustainability. For local government more broadly, it demonstrates the value of regional collaboration: national standards and datasets are important, but councils also need the capacity to interpret, challenge and translate them into local action.The benefits extend beyond our region. The wider use of the International Recruitment Dashboard shows how tools developed collaboratively in one region can be scaled across England, giving councils consistent intelligence, supporting shared learning and reducing duplication. The same principle now applies to workforce and market intelligence: build once, learn together and adapt locally.Adult social care will continue to face significant workforce, financial and demand pressures. Data alone will not solve those challenges. But used well, shared intelligence can help councils understand communities better, identify risks earlier, strengthen assurance, shape markets and make more confident decisions about the future.The next phase of the WM-ADASS Data Hub is about leadership as much as technology. Councils cannot predict the future perfectly, but we can be better prepared. By turning shared data into trusted intelligence, we can help develop the services, markets and workforce our communities need in the years ahead.Hilary Hall is corporate director community wellbeing at Herefordshire Council and director of adult social services workforce lead, and Pete Sidgwick is director of social care and support at Warwickshire CC and ADASS data leadFind out more about the Improvement for All Programme at www.wm-adass.org.uk

Title

ADULT SOCIAL CARE

Using data to plan the future of adult social care

By Hilary Hall, Pete Sidgwick | 17 September 2026

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