Why demand mapping is the hardest part of the commissioning process

Under the Care Act 2014, local authorities have a duty to understand both current and future demand for care and support in their area. The Care and Support Statutory Guidance is explicit on this point: authorities must "take steps to identify and understand both the current and future demand for preventative support" and should consider "the number of people in its area with existing needs for care and support, as well as those at risk of developing needs in the future" (paragraphs 2.25 and 2.29). The guidance points commissioners towards Joint Strategic Needs Assessments (JSNAs) and collaboration with NHS and voluntary sector partners to build that picture. In practice, JSNAs are produced by Health and Wellbeing Boards on their own multi-year refresh cycle and are usually pitched at population-health level, valuable for context but rarely granular enough on their own to drive placement-type or provider-capacity decisions for supported living specifically. They set direction; they don't replace the more operational data sources below.

For supported living specifically, this duty now sits inside a firmer statutory framework. Under the government's Local Supported Housing Strategies guidance, published following the Supported Housing (Regulatory Oversight) Act, every local authority in England must publish a strategy by 31 March 2027 and refresh it at least every five years. Our earlier guide on how local authorities commission supported living walks through the five phases of that process. This article goes deeper on phase three: needs assessment and data mapping, because it is consistently the step where strategies stall.

The difficulty is not simply a lack of data. It is that the data comes from several different systems, none of which was designed with supported living commissioning in mind, and none of which updates fast enough to match how quickly local need actually moves.

What data sources actually exist, and their limitations

Commissioners typically draw on five main sources, each with real value and a real gap.

Housing Benefit data on specified and exempt accommodation is the closest thing to a national record of supported housing stock. Since 2014, the Department for Work and Pensions has required local authorities to report on these cases. But the National Audit Office found in its May 2023 investigation into supported housing that "DWP and DLUHC do not routinely collect data at a national level on the numbers of all people in supported housing," and that local authorities reported this data inconsistently. New recording requirements introduced from April 2022 are improving matters, but the NAO noted they will "only gradually improve data quality as new claims are made." Crisis estimated 153,701 exempt accommodation households in Great Britain as of May 2021, a 62% rise since 2016, the most recent national estimate available. Worth flagging: exempt/specified accommodation Housing Benefit data captures a broader category than adult-social-care-commissioned supported living alone, including hostels, refuges and some sheltered provision, and it also doesn't capture provision that's self-funded or funded through direct payments or NHS Continuing Healthcare rather than Housing Benefit. It's a useful proxy, not a complete count.

Specialised Supported Housing (SSH), the higher-need model typically financed through investor-backed lease arrangements and built on NHS or local authority nomination agreements, is a distinct commissioning channel again, with its own market dynamics and its own data gaps. It's worth understanding as a separate category rather than assuming the Housing Benefit data above captures it well.

Adult social care activity and finance statistics, published by NHS England, are the main national dataset on care needs, packages and spend. They are rigorous and comparable across authorities. They are also slow. The 2023-24 report, covering the year to 31 March 2024, was published on 31 October 2024, roughly seven months after the period it describes. For a commissioner trying to plan supported living provision for the year ahead, that is a report describing a world that has already moved on.

Provider intelligence, gathered through market engagement, tender responses and relationship management, is often the most current source a commissioning team has. Providers know their occupancy, their waiting interest and their pipeline before any official statistic captures it. The weakness is that this intelligence is fragmented by design. Every authority holds its own version, usually in spreadsheets or inboxes, rarely benchmarked against what neighbouring authorities or providers operating regionally are seeing.

Referral and waiting-list data sits inside each authority's own case management system and is, in principle, the most immediate signal of unmet need. In practice it is hard to use even internally. The Local Government Association's November 2024 report on adult social care waiting lists found more than 400,000 people across England waiting for a needs assessment or for care to begin, and noted there is "no universally accepted definition of a waiting list" between councils. The same definitional inconsistency applies to "supported living" itself, recorded differently across ASC-FR returns, Housing Benefit classifications and local case systems, which means even fast, local data is hard to compare between authorities.

Demographic projections from the Office for National Statistics, and increasingly ICB or NHS-held data on hospital discharge pressure and Better Care Fund activity, complete the picture. Demographic projections say nothing on their own about placement type or provider capacity. NHS-side data is arguably under-used here: hospital discharge delay is one of the largest single pressures driving supported living referrals, and the companion commissioning-guide article names the local Integrated Care Board as a required partner in strategy development for exactly this reason, but that data rarely feeds directly into the demand-mapping data sources commissioners actually build their assessments from.

Why static, annual data struggles to keep pace with need

Put these sources together and the pattern is consistent: each one is either current and fragmented, or comparable and stale. National statistics give commissioners a reliable baseline months after the fact. Local case data gives them something closer to real time, but in a form too inconsistent to compare or aggregate. Neither, on its own, tells a commissioner what is happening in the market this quarter.

This lag matters more for supported living than for most other care settings, because the supply side is thin and slow to respond. A provider decision to open or close a service takes months to plan and, once made, is not easily reversed. If a commissioning team is working from data that is seven months old, and providers are working from their own more recent but unshared intelligence, the two sides of the market are effectively planning against different pictures of demand.

ADASS's surveys of directors of adult social services have repeatedly flagged this gap between the pace of demand change and the pace at which authorities can respond, alongside sustained overspend pressure across the sector. The direction of travel in national policy, including moves towards publishing council-level waiting time data, suggests government recognises the same problem: annual, retrospective statistics are necessary for accountability but insufficient for live commissioning decisions.

What "live" or more current data would change

A more current view of demand would not replace the statutory data sources above. It would sit alongside them, closing the gap between what is officially recorded and what is happening in the market now: current provider capacity and occupancy trends alongside demographic projections, rather than capacity inferred from historic Housing Benefit returns, and referral pressure that can be compared across property types and localities without waiting for the next annual finance report.

None of this changes the statutory basis for needs assessment. The Care Act duty and the Local Supported Housing Strategies timetable remain the framework. What changes is the quality of the evidence commissioners can bring to that framework.

FAQ

What does the Care Act 2014 actually require in terms of needs assessment for supported living commissioning?

The Care and Support Statutory Guidance requires local authorities to understand current and future demand for care and support, drawing on sources such as the Joint Strategic Needs Assessment and working with NHS and voluntary sector partners (paragraphs 2.25–2.30). It does not prescribe a single dataset or methodology, which is part of why practice varies so widely between authorities.

How current is national adult social care data, and can it be used for live commissioning decisions?

The most recent Adult Social Care Activity and Finance Report, covering April 2023 to March 2024, was published by NHS England on 31 October 2024, around seven months after the period it covers. It is a reliable baseline for trend analysis and benchmarking but is not current enough on its own to guide in-year commissioning or market shaping decisions.

Why is Housing Benefit data on supported housing considered unreliable?

The National Audit Office's 2023 investigation found that neither DWP nor the then-DLUHC collected complete national data on people in supported housing, and that local authorities reported this data inconsistently. It also only captures Housing-Benefit-funded provision, missing self-funded and NHS-funded supported living. Reporting requirements tightened from April 2022, but the NAO expects data quality to improve only gradually.

How many people are currently waiting for an adult social care assessment or for care to start?

The Local Government Association reported in November 2024 that more than 400,000 people across England were waiting for a needs assessment or for care and support to begin, while also noting that councils use inconsistent definitions of what counts as a waiting list, which limits national comparability.

For commissioners

See live supported living demand and provider capacity in your local authority area.

Sources