Team ADASS 2012/13 

 The Association of Directors of Adult Social Services (ADASS) represents all the directors of adult social services in England. It evolved from the former ADSS (Association of Directors of Social Services) when responsibilities for adults and children’s services within top tier local authorities were split between two new departments - the one for adults and the other for children.

ADASS brings together the accumulated wisdom and understanding of the way services for adults are managed and financed as well as inputs from a widening responsibility for housing, leisure, library, culture and, in some case, arts and sports facilities.

Our members are responsible for providing or commissioning, through the activities of their departments, the wellbeing, protection and care of hundreds of thousands of elderly and disabled people, as well as for the promotion of that wellbeing and protection wherever it is needed.

ADASS members, too, are responsible for a whole range of wider services in addition to their responsibilities to adult social care. We work through a staff group which, in direct and indirect forms of employment, number more than the total staff engaged in the NHS.

At the same we maintain the closest possible formal and informal links with colleagues in the health services, children’s services departments and in the independent provision of day and residential services to older people. We continue actively to inform and brief government ministers and civil servants about the impact of their policies; work with them on policy initiatives wherever appropriate, while engaging with opinion formers across the whole spectrum of current media outlets.