Social care regulation: resource use. Final report

Abstract

This paper reports on the findings of a study investigating the resource use of the NCSC. Our aim was to identify the resource requirements of the NCSC given current workloads and practice. The timing of the study means that the results need to be treated with some caution (see Appendix A). We start by briefly describing the method and response rates and then set the context in terms of the overall levels of regulatory responsibilities and activity during the first year of the NCSC. In section 4 we describe the work undertaken by inspectors and managers in terms of their caseloads and overall time use. We then turn to the individual regulatory activities in order to identify the resource use in terms of time input to the regulatory process, compare with the results of the previous studies and explore factors associated with variations in time taken. We end by identifying the unit cost of staff time and the estimated costs of each of the measured regulatory activities