Guidance for completing the Safeguarding Adults Collection (SAC) 2023-24

The 2023-24 Safeguarding Adults Collection (SAC) records details about safeguarding activity for adults aged 18 and over in England, reported to, or identified by, Councils with Adult Social Services Responsibilities (CASSRs or local authorities). The collection includes demographic information about the adults at risk and details of the incidents that have been alleged.

The SAC is an updated version of the Safeguarding Adults Return (SAR) which collected safeguarding data for the 2013-14 and 2014-15 reporting periods.

A Data Dictionary is now available on the Adult Social Care Data Hub The Data Dictionary ensures definitions for all Social Care collections are available in one place and over time, this will help ensure the individual guidance documents are more succinct. Links to the data dicationary have been added to this document where relevant.

The collection tool for the 2023-24 reporting year will again be the Strategic Data Collection System (SDCS). Guidance for using the system is available. 

The SAC submission data template is available to download. 

The template is designed to show the data items required for submission and therefore help collate data from local systems. Free text comment boxes are included in order that providers can explain data quality issues or activity variances if required.

Details in the Sign Off Sheet must be completed otherwise your file will not be accepted by SDCS.

The SAC worksheet includes colour coding for the mandatory and voluntary fields - white cells in the data template document relate to mandatory categories or metrics and blue cells relate to the voluntary ones.

Data validation of the mandatory data fields is also incorporated in the sheet. Error messages will appear in dark blue in column M of the data template where mandatory cells have been left blank. Templates will not be accepted for upload by SDCS if there are any error messages visible in column M. Cells that fail a consistency check, where for example the total of the relevant cell(s) should be equal to, greater than or less than cells in other tables, will be highlighted with messages in light blue as detailed in columns N and O of the data template. Consistency check failures will be flagged by SDCS, but upload will still be possible.

A comments section has been added at the end of the data template. Please complete this to explain any validation errors remaining in your return or for any other comment regarding the submitted data. There is a drop-down list to select the relevant table if required or this can be left blank for general comments.

Decisions affecting the SAC, such as the data submission method or proposed changes for future years, are made in consultation with the Safeguarding Adults Collection working group. If you or a representative from your local authority are interested in joining this group, please contact us at the e-mail address.

Contact us 

If you have any queries regarding the SAC, please contact the safeguarding team at the NHS England using the below details. Comments on the guidance or the data template are also welcome.
Email: [email protected]
Telephone: 0300 303 5678 (Please ask for the Adult Social Care Statistics team).

As communicated in the September letter, the Reported Health Condition (RHC) of Learning, Developmental or Intellectual Disability will no longer include Autism or Asperger’s Syndrome. Instead these two sub-categories will now be reported together as one category of Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Therefore the relevant RHCs will now become:

• Learning, Developmental or Intellectual Disability – sub-class: Learning Disability
• Learning, Developmental or Intellectual Disability – sub-class: Other
• Autism Spectrum Disorder – sub-class: Autism Spectrum Disorder