Free Personal and Nursing Care, Scotland, 2022-23

This section presents total expenditure on Personal Care at Home for people receiving Care at Home services, presented as totals for the 2022-23 financial year.

Expenditure on Personal Care at Home in the last week of each quarter is directly provided by Local Authorities within the Quarterly Monitoring Return. These figures were then used to estimate total annual expenditure.

Age 65 and over

An estimated £444 million was spent on providing Personal Care services to people aged 65+ in their own home in 2022-23. This is a 7% increase from the £417 million spent the previous year.

Per client, the average estimated expenditure on Personal Care at Home for those aged 65+ was £10,900 in 2022-23.

(Please note: these figures only account for spending by the 29 Local Authorities able to submit data – see above).

Before 2021-22, data on expenditure on Personal Care at Home for clients aged 65 and over was sourced from the LFR03 return, so is not comparable with these Quarterly Monitoring Return figures from the last 2 years. See ‘Expenditure Data’ under Limitations of Data and Further Background in the ‘Methodology and Background Information’ document accompanying this publication for more information.

Age 18 to 64

An estimated £258 million was spent on Personal Care services at home for people aged 18-64 in 2022-23 – a 9% increase from the £237 million spent the previous year. Expenditure on Personal Care at Home for those aged 18-64 has increased by 44% from £179 million in 2018-19, an average increase of 10% per year in the subsequent 4 years.

Per client, the average estimated expenditure on Personal Care at Home for those aged 18-64 was £22,900 in 2022-23.

(Please note: these figures only account for spending by the 29 Local Authorities able to submit data – see above).

Full data is available in the accompanying tables, both at Scotland total and Local Authority level.

Possible explanations for long-term trends in expenditure data

Many Local Authorities have seen a rise in Personal Care at Home costs from 2013-14. In addition to increased demand, this is likely related to reasons including:

• a shift in the balance of care, away from Care Homes towards more Care at Home
• the introduction of equal pay provision resulting in higher wage costs
• the provision of refunds to clients for meal preparation where this was previously charged for
• introduction of real living wage and other wage inflation which has led to increased cost of services