Estates Returns Information Collection, Summary page and dataset for ERIC 2022/23

This return forms the central collection of Estates and Facilities data from all NHS organisations in England providing NHS funded secondary care during the fiscal year ending 31st March. ERIC data provides the Government with essential information relating to the safety, quality, running costs and activity related to the NHS estates and also supports work to improve efficiency. It is therefore critical that the data provided is of the highest quality in terms of its accuracy as well as being consistent with other trusts. 

ERIC is a mandatory collection with which trusts are required to comply under the terms of Section 259 of the Health and Social Care Act 2012. In addition, the NHS Standard Contract also requires trusts to comply with this collection in the manner and timescale set out in the collection announcement letter sent by NHS England.
 

All data are provided via NHS England's Estates and Facilities Management (EFM) system, which includes internal validation methodology to help towards responses that are accurate and within expected ranges (details of these are provided in the appendix of this document). Final submission of data cannot be completed until all required responses have been entered and the return must have been signed off by the Director of Estates (or equivalent) on behalf of the  trust's Chief Executive; responsibility for data accuracy rests ultimately with the data providers.

Once committed no further changes to submitted data can be made without the agreement of NHS England (who are the only organisation able to 'un-commit' submitted data). Ultimately data quality is the responsibility of data providers (however, please also see the Data validation section below).

Whilst trusts have different estate and facilities needs as well as different approaches to management locally, ERIC aims to collect nationally consistent and accurate data that can be relied upon to support analysis. The onus is therefore on NHS Trusts to ensure that all data provided by them is complete, accurate and up to date. All data providers are obliged to undertake the following actions before they submit their data:

• To compare and reconcile all data with information in the previous year's ERIC return and with the present year's financial accounts and the Trust's Annual report. This includes where the data, especially costs, are affected by amendments caused by actions in previous years e.g., rate rebates.
• Check any data for which validation queries have been raised, and resubmit figures if necessary.
• The Director of Estates must check, approve, and sign off the ERIC return.

Since the 2018/19 collection NHS England's Workforce and Estates Team and Estates Division have jointly undertaken additional measures to improve data quality. These include extra validations on point of entry and alignment of communications and clarifications to data providers, and an enhanced assurance process once the initial collection phase had been completed.

For 2022/23, we introduced a phase of mid-collection scrutiny by NHS England area leads on the energy, waste and backlog maintenance metrics (requiring these fields to be provisionally completed by trusts at an early stage). Once the initial collection phase was complete, additional manual validation checks were carried out for data fields that continued to suggest errors have been made at trust and site level (either by a large variation from the previous year’s figure, or by a large variation from values submitted by their organisation type peers). Due to the size of the collection and the amount of data included, this process was limited to a selected range of agreed site metrics. Trusts were contacted and asked to review their figures. 

Lists of system and manual validations carried out can be found in the appendix to this document.

NHS England implements the following policies regarding the correction of erroneous ERIC data:

• Prior to publication (up to the point where data was finalised for release preparation), where any returns were found to contain inaccurate data following discussions with data providers, the return was uncommitted by NHS England allowing the Trust to amend and re-commit their return. 
• Following publication, any corrections required will be made in line with the NHS Digital revisions procedure:

https://digital.nhs.uk/binaries/content/assets/website-assets/publications/publications-admin-pages/related-documents/revisions-procedure.pdf