Market sustainability and fair cost of care (FCoC)

As part of the Government’s adult social care reform agenda, local authorities are required to complete a Fair Cost of Care (FCoC) exercise with providers to identify the local cost of providing care.

The scope of the FCoC exercise was to gather data on the costs of care from older people’s care homes (65+) and home care providers (18+). It did not cover other sectors of the market. 

Authorities were required to submit to the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) by 14 October 2022 the results from the exercise for review and to ensure that they complied with the conditions of the Fair Cost of Care Grant. They were also required to submit a Draft Market Sustainability Plan.

By the end of March 2023, authorities are required to publish a final Market Sustainability Plan containing information on the current market position, key challenges and how they plan to address these. Authorities are also required to detail how they plan to move towards a fair cost of care (where this is not already being paid) over the next three years.

For the purposes of the exercise, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) consider ‘fair’ to mean the median actual operating costs for providing care in the local area (following completion of the exercise). ‘Fair’ also means what is sustainable for the local market.

FCoC exercise

From the information we received from providers we were able to complete and submit to the DHSC the two Cost of Care Reports for their review and approval and are now publishing them on our website as required.

• Annex B residential care [pdf document]
• Annex B domiciliary care [pdf document]

As noted in the published documents we are reviewing the data collected from our providers and will be working with providers to identify a fair cost of care.  

We  have also finalised our  Market Sustainability Plan in the context of the Local Government Financial Settlement in December 2022.

Market Sustainability Plan [pdf document]

FCoC grant

The council has already distributed the FCoC Grant it received for 2022-23 to both residential and domiciliary care providers. A decision on how the 2023-24 grant allocation will be distributed will be notified to providers once we receive the Grant Conditions from DHSC as to the criteria for allocation.

 Further details on the FCoC exercise can be found on the gov.uk website [external link].