This is the average price the council pays for one week of care-home accommodation for one person — typically around £1,000, covering housing, meals and round-the-clock care. It matters because care-home placements are among the largest single costs in a council's budget, so even small differences per week add up to millions a year. A high figure can mean an expensive local care market or weak purchasing; a low one can mean good value — or downward pressure on care quality. It is the cleanest single number for comparing care-buying efficiency between councils.
| name | asc_unit_cost_res_nursing_care |
|---|---|
| dataset | 07-adult-social-care-finance |
| kind | extracted |
| type | numeric |
| unit | £ per person per week |
| grain | council (CASSR), keyed on GEOGRAPHY_CODE |
| role | feature |
| source | data/data-pack-2024-25/adult-social-care-finance-report-2024-2025-csv-data-tables.csv; filter GEOGRAPHY_LEVEL='Local Authority' AND DATA_Level='UNIT COST' AND ValueType='UNIT COST' AND CareType='Long Term Care' AND SupportSetting='Residential and Nursing' AND AgeBand='' AND ActivityProvision='All' |
| period | FY 2024-25 (FY_ENDING=2025) |
| missingness | Suppressed/missing cells are `[x]` — treat as NA, never zero |
| score_note | The headline weekly care-home unit cost — the cleanest, strongest efficiency signal in the dataset. |
| peer_group | CASSRs (the 153 social-care authorities) — not yet scored on the leaderboard |
Average weekly cost the council pays for a care-home placement (residential + nursing combined, all ages). Verified: Northumberland = £1,009.14/wk; the companion ValueType='Numerator' row is spend in £000s and 'Denominator' is person-weeks (97,690 / 96,805 × 1000). Blank AgeBand means "not applicable" (all ages), per the file's conventions.