PARLIAMENTARY WRITTEN QUESTION
Social Services: Older People (10 December 2018)

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment the Government has made of the effect on the provision of adult social care services of projected increases in the elderly population.

Asked by:
Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Labour)

The Department commissions the Personal Social Services Research Unit to produce projections of the demand for long-term care for older people and younger adults in England to 2040 and beyond and associated future expenditure. The projections are based on specific assumptions about trends in such variables as future mortality rates and disability rates, and are updated regularly as new data become available – for example official population projections published by the Office for National Statistics. In doing so, the model explicitly takes account of projected increases in the elderly population.

More detail is available in Wittenberg R, Hu B and Hancock R (2018) Projections of demand and expenditure on adult social care 2015 to 2040, Personal Social Services Research Unit discussion paper 2944/2, first published in June 2018 and revised in November 2018.

The report is available at the following link:

https://www.pssru.ac.uk/publications/pub-5421/

Answered by:
Dame Caroline Dinenage (Conservative)
13 December 2018