Valuing Care Uplift Service – Durham County Council

Durham County Council

Working Age Adults – Residential
December 2024 – Summer 2025

Context

Durham County Council was operating within a challenging Working Age Adult residential care market, characterised by rising cost pressures and historic variation in placement prices. Over time, individual placements had been agreed under different market conditions, making it increasingly difficult to demonstrate consistency or clearly link inflationary uplifts to the actual cost of delivering care.

Alongside financial pressures, the Council was focused on its wider market-shaping responsibilities. The objective was not simply to manage inflation, but to ensure that available resources were directed in a way that supported provider sustainability, mitigated market risk and strengthened long-term stability.

The Challenge

  • Variation in prices across comparable residential placements
  • Limited consistent evidence of provider cost structures
  • Requirement to apply inflationary uplifts within a constrained budget
  • Need for a transparent, defensible and auditable uplift process
  • Tight delivery timescales aligned to budget setting

Valuing Care’s Approach

Durham County Council engaged Valuing Care to deliver its Uplift Service powered by Purchaser, combining specialist costing software with experienced delivery support.

The service was designed to support Durham to:

  • Establish a clear, evidence-based view of the true cost of care at placement level
  • Apply inflationary uplifts consistently and transparently
  • Avoid blanket uplifts where prices could not be evidenced
  • Release capacity within the system to support areas of genuine sustainability pressure
  • Embed a repeatable process for future uplift cycles

Key elements of the approach included:

  • Deployment of Purchaser costing software using locally informed residential cost models
  • Structured collection and validation of provider costing templates
  • Benchmarking of individual placements against modelled costs
  • Ongoing provider engagement and query resolution
  • Clear audit trails to support internal governance and assurance

Implementation and Delivery

Valuing Care commenced the uplift process in December 2024, issuing provider communications and requesting detailed costing information. Providers were supported throughout the data collection and modelling phase to ensure clarity, completeness and data quality.

Cost modelling and inflation analysis were completed by March 2025, enabling the Council to review outcomes within its governance and budget-setting framework. Following this, Valuing Care continued to support Durham County Council through spring and summer 2025, responding to provider queries, clarifying model outputs and supporting the Council in managing discussions arising from uplift decisions.

This extended support ensured that the uplift process remained transparent and defensible, while helping the Council maintain constructive relationships with providers during implementation.

Outcomes and Impact

Improved Market Intelligence

A total of 154 residential placements were included within the uplift review. Each placement was assessed against Valuing Care’s residential cost models, providing Durham with a consistent, placement-level view of how current prices compared to a fair cost of care.

This enabled the Council to distinguish clearly between:

  • Placements where prices were already aligned with, or above, modelled costs
  • Placements where costs could be evidenced and justified
  • Cases where insufficient information was provided to support an inflationary uplift

Targeting Resources to Support Sustainability

Rather than applying inflation uniformly, Durham used the outputs from Purchaser to apply uplifts selectively, focusing support where it was most needed. Inflation was primarily awarded to placements that were below the cost model, ensuring that limited resources were directed toward sustaining viable care provision.

This approach released capacity within the overall inflation envelope, allowing the Council to:

  • Avoid reinforcing historic price anomalies
  • Target investment toward providers facing genuine cost pressures
  • Strengthen market stability without increasing overall financial risk

Wider Commissioning Benefits

In addition to the immediate uplift exercise, the project delivered wider benefits for Durham County Council, including:

  • A clear and defensible methodology for inflation decisions
  • Improved assurance and auditability
  • Reduced commissioning workload through structured data and automation
  • Stronger foundations for future negotiations and market engagement
  • A model that can be reused and refined in future years

Sustainability and Future Use

The 2024/25 uplift review established a repeatable framework for managing inflation in Durham’s residential care market. By embedding Valuing Care’s Uplift Service and Purchaser software, the Council has strengthened its ability to balance financial control with market sustainability, ensuring that future uplifts are fair, targeted and evidence based.