Deferred Payment Agreements - 2020-21

This data quality statement aims to provide users with an evidence-based assessment of the quality of the 2020-21 statistical output from the Deferred Payments Agreement (DPA) collection return, reporting against the nine European Statistical System (ESS) quality dimensions.

It provides final 2020-21 information for Adult Social Care DPA activity and expenditure in England on adults aged 18 and over for Councils with Adult Social Services Responsibilities (CASSRs) - referred to throughout this publication as local authorities for ease of reading. The data are derived from the DPA returns which local authorities in England submitted to NHS Digital. The DPA collection was newly introduced in 2015-16 on a voluntary basis. In 2016-17 the collection was part mandatory, and became fully mandatory in 2017-18.

This report provides information on the known data quality issues within the 2020-21 Adult Social Care DPA report and accompanying data, in order to allow the reader and users of the data to understand any limitations of the data. This document should be used in conjunction with the publication’s data quality summary tables, main publication report findings and associated data files.

The DPA return holds the following separate worksheets:

• DPA activity data
• DPA finance data
• New requests for DPAs
• Nature of current DPAs
• Recovery of DPAs

The guidance and a copy of the tables for each collection are available on the NHS Digital social care collection materials.

The degree to which the statistical product meets user needs in both coverage and content

The report covers the number of and £ value of DPAs for local authorities in England.

The data are used by central government and by local authorities to assess their performance in relation to their peers. It is also available for use by researchers looking at local authority performance and by clients and the public to hold local authorities and government to account.

The proximity between an estimate and the unknown true value

The accuracy of the DPA data is the responsibility of the local authorities who submit the data to NHS Digital. The return is an aggregate collection taken from administrative systems. As NHS Digital does not have access to the individual records behind the aggregate counts, we are reliant on local authorities to assess their own data quality.

In many instances, assessing reliability depends on local knowledge, as each local authority determines the approach taken in their area; what may be an anomaly in one area could be considered standard practice elsewhere. However, a range of activities are undertaken (outlined in more detail below) to check and improve quality.

The submission and validation process for each collection is carried out as follows:

1. The local authority collates the data for submission in the relevant collection form. This form includes inbuilt validations to allow councils to check their data for common issues prior to submission.
2. The local authority submits data by the mandated deadline.
3. All local authorities who met the deadline receive a data quality report covering critical validations and also providing some derived totals allowing councils to confirm their data is correct.
4. NHS Digital reviews the quality of all files submitted and may provide additional support to local authorities with significant data quality issues.
5. Local authorities are able to resubmit data to amend any identified quality issues.
6. Final deadline for submission.
7. Following the final deadline NHS Digital will carry out analysis of the quality of final deadline. Although local authorities cannot resubmit data after this point, they may be contacted for additional clarification or context.

The validation checks carried out throughout this process include:

• Checks for missing data items
• Checks for instances of recorded activity without associated expenditure and vice versa
• Validations across worksheets to check figures across different tables store the same figures i.e. For DPA003 table 3a the number of new requests where a DPA was approved should match the number of new DPAs recorded in DPA001.

The final validations consisted of looking at the responses to the validation checks mentioned above to see if there are clear instances where data are implausible or local authorities have submitted data not in line with the guidance for the data collection. Local authorities are then contacted where necessary.

In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, common issues local authorities advised us of include:

• Some delays to property valuations
• Some delays in clients being able to complete the necessary paperwork

Anomalies were detected in the “Ended DPAs where recovery was attempted, and a partial value was recovered during the year” £ value data provided by Havering and Surrey. Both local authorities advised this was an error and so the reference data has been annotated accordingly.

Information on the number of local authorities returning data by the first cut (by the mandated deadline) and by the final cut (by the final deadline) is available on the completeness tab of the Data Quality summary tables. These summary tables also include information provided by local authorities for any validation breaches.

Returns were submitted by all 151 of 151 local authorities.

Timeliness refers to the time gap between publication and the reference period. Punctuality refers to the gap between planned and actual publication dates

The DPA data collection is undertaken annually and published each year. This report relates to the financial year 2020-21 and is being released ten months after the period to which the data relate. Due to COVID-19 and the extra pressures felt by local authorities, collection deadlines were extended this year; for DPA, this was by an additional two months.

This publication has been released in line with the pre-announced publication date and is therefore deemed to be punctual.

Accessibility is the ease with which users are able to access the data, also reflecting the format in which the data are available and the availability of supporting information. Clarity refers to the quality and sufficiency of the metadata, illustrations and accompanying advice

This publication is now available in HTML, in order to meet the Government Accessibility Standard. Reference data tables are available to download from the NHS Digital website in Excel (.xlsx) format and a machine-readable comma-separated values (.csv) file allows the reader access to the underlying data.

DPA data relating to client numbers have been rounded to the nearest five. Any data inputted between 0 and 4 have also been suppressed. Values of less than £10,000 have been suppressed. All other monetary values will be rounded to the nearest £10,000.

Coherence is the degree to which data that are derived from different sources or methods, but refer to the same topic, are similar.

This is a statutory data collection to collect Deferred Payments Agreement information across England; there are no current alternative sources of this data with which these can be compared.

The DPA collection was newly introduced in 2015-16 on a voluntary basis. In 2016-17 the collection was part mandatory, and became fully mandatory in 2017-18. Therefore care must be taken when comparing DPA data across years.

In comparison to the last collected data, there are no changes to this year’s data collections.

Trade-offs are the extent to which different aspects of quality are balanced against each other.

For the 2020-21 reporting period, two submission periods were made available for local authorities. This was consistent with last year’s return. Data Quality reports and support were made available to those local authorities who submitted by the first (mandated) deadline.  Local authorities were able to make updates to their first cut of data before the second (final) deadline.  Further detail is available in our data quality outputs however it is important to consider this when reviewing this year’s data and changes over time.

The processes for finding out about users and uses, and their views on the statistical products

User feedback on the format and content of the 2020-21 Adult Social Care Deferred Payment Agreements report is invited; please send any comments to [email protected].

Information about the Social Care collection materials 2020-21 is available.

Changes to upcoming collections can be seen in the most recent September letter.

The data collection process used in this publication is subject to assurance by the Data Standards Assurance Service (DSAS) (previously known as the Challenging Burden Service(CBS)). This is to ensure that data collections do not duplicate other collections, minimise the burden to all parties and have a specific use for the data collected. 

The burden of the DPA collection used in this report has been assessed and approved, the burden of any changes to the collection are similarly assessed, to ensure that they do not create undue burden for local authorities.

The procedures and policy used to ensure sound confidentiality, security and transparent practices

All statistics are subject to a standard NHS Digital risk assessment prior to issue. The risk assessment considers the sensitivity of the data and whether any of the reporting products may disclose information about specific individuals. Methods of disclosure control are discussed and the most appropriate methods implemented. As a result of this process, DPA data relating to client numbers have been rounded to the nearest five. Any data inputted between 0 and 4 has also been suppressed. Values of less than £10,000 have been suppressed. All other monetary values will be rounded to the nearest £10,000 in our reference tables and csv files.

NHS Digital aims to be transparent in all its activities. A description of the collection process and any issues with the quality of the 2020-21 DPA data are documented in the Accuracy and Reliability section of this report.

DPA data is submitted to NHS Digital through a secure electronic file transfer system called SDCS. The submitted files are transferred from SDCS and stored on a secure network with restricted access folders.

Please see links below for more information about related NHS Digital policies:

Statistical Governance Policy [Archive Content]

Freedom of Information Process

Data Access Request Service

Privacy and data protection

Small Numbers Procedure