LAs spend £2.600m (£2,200m net of income) providing Home Care to a total of nearly 400,000 users, i.e. an average cost of £6500 pa per user, or £130 per week. The average user receives 9 hours of service per week, at an average cost of £14 per contact hour. These are statistical averages, which hide the great variation in the needs of individual users, in the volume (and type) of service provided, and in the amount they pay for it.

In simple terms, the cost of home care per contact hour depends on the three key factors:

• average pay of the care staff,
• the amount of their time spent on travel or other non-contact activity
• the level of overhead costs and other expenses,

This club will therefore uses a framework for own-provision home care that examines how these factors effect the unit costs.

PSS Ex1 Data will be used to provide comparisons with externally provided homecare.