By Katharine Sacks-Jones, chief executive, Become

As social workers, playing a leading role in the lives of care-experienced young people, you know more than anyone the immense pressure the system is under.

The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, introduced in December, clearly intends to improve children’s social care, through measures including better oversight and regulation about where children live and increased support for care leavers.

However, further scrutiny shows there are places where it could be strengthened, to significantly improve opportunities and experiences for care-experienced young people.

Last month, I gave evidence to the parliamentary committee looking at the bill, setting out what we welcome, and where it needs to go further for young people. After all, it’s only if their needs are being met that we know the system is working.

Strengthening Staying Close support

Statutory homelessness rates for care leavers aged 18-20 have increased by 54% in the past five years.

This has to change, which is why our End The Care Cliff campaign has been calling for the Staying Put and Staying Close schemes to be fully funded legal entitlements for all care leavers up to 25, unless they opt out.

It’s good news then that the bill says that local authorities must assess whether care leavers aged under 25 require Staying Close support and would then be under a duty to provide it to those in need.

But, as the criteria for assessment is not set out, we’re concerned this could lead to a rationing of support or a postcode lottery. We also want to see young people’s wishes and preferences taken into account in determining what support they might benefit from.

Going further on tackling care leaver homelessness

No young person should be facing homelessness, so it was especially welcome to see the government taking up a key ask of End the Care Cliff, by proposing an amendment to prevent care leavers from being found intentionally homeless. Now we’d like them to go further.

Currently, care leavers aged 18-20 are automatically assessed as being in ‘priority need’, which means local authorities are required to provide them with accommodation.

We think the bill should extend this to care leavers up to the age of 25, giving them a much-needed safety net.

The importance of financial support to care leavers

The bill will require local authorities to publish information about how they are supporting care leavers, particularly around housing, which we think is a positive move.

We frequently hear from young people on our Care Advice Line who are in acute financial crisis, so would like to see an additional focus on what financial support is available to young people leaving care.

Extending corporate parenting duties beyond councils

We’re disappointed that government proposals to extend corporate parenting duties to other public bodies are not currently included in the legislation, and hope they will reconsider bringing forward this important measure.

Preventing distant placements by regional commissioners

The bill gives the government new powers to direct neighbouring local authorities to commission care jointly, with the aim of improving their assessments of need and strategies for ensuring sufficient placements.

We want to make sure that these regional co-operation arrangements don’t lead to more children being moved far from their local area, even if it’s still within the region.

Our Gone Too Far campaign highlights the negative impact of moving children far from families, friends and schools. Far too many young people tell us how this is disrupting their education, affecting their mental health, breaking their connections and leaving them isolated.

This is why we’d like a safeguard in the bill to prevent distant moves when it’s not in children’s best interests.

Requiring a national sufficiency plan

Local authorities are required to offer sufficient, suitable accommodation for children in their care. Underfunding and an increase in the number of children in care have made this challenging.

This has created huge instability for children and led to an increasing number of children living far away.

Whilst the bill introduces a number of welcome measures, including better financial oversight and powers to bring in profit caps for private providers, it doesn’t mention how it will boost capacity.

There needs to be a national strategy to understand how many children in care are living in places that don’t meet their needs, what’s needed to address this and how government will support local authorities to deliver.

Being ambitious for care-experienced young people

We know from the work we do with professionals like you that only so much can be done with the resources available, which is why we need to see funding commitments flowing from this legislation too.

It’s time to be ambitious and deliver the changes care-experienced young people need.

Become supports children in care and young care leavers 

The government has pledged to “crack down on care providers making excessive profit” from care placements, in children’s social care reforms unveiled today.

Labour’s proposed reforms to tackle “profiteering” are similar to those put forward by its Conservative predecessor, including through the regional commissioning of care placements and increasing the transparency of providers’ pricing.

But the government also warned that, should these not work as anticipated, it would cap providers’ profit levels from children’s social care placements.

The reforms, set out in a policy paper today, also include empowering Ofsted to investigate companies running multiple children’s homes and more speedily take enforcement action against unregistered services.

The Department for Education (DfE) will also tighten recently introduced rules limiting councils’ use of agency social workers by placing these into legislation and extending them to cover other children’s social care staff.

New safeguarding requirements on councils

In addition, it will require councils to set up multi-agency child safeguarding teams, and to also offer family group decision making meetings when cases reach the pre-proceedings stage, to give family networks the chance to find alternatives to children going into care.

In response to the huge rise in children being deprived of their liberty under the powers of the High Court due to a lack of suitable placements, it will create a statutory framework for these cases.

The DfE added that its reforms, generally, would also seek to rebalance the system towards early intervention in order to keep families together, in the context of the care population standing at near-record levels.  

This continues the emphasis of the agenda set out by the Conservatives in their Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy published last year, which was itself based on the recommendations of the 2021-22 Independent Review of Children’s Social Care.

The policy paper said the legislation the DfE was proposing would be brought forward when parliamentary time allows. This is likely to be through the Children’s Wellbeing Bill, which was promised in the King’s Speech.

‘We will crack down on providers making excessive profit’

Education secretary Bridget Phillipson said the care system was “bankrupting councils, letting families down, and above all, leaving too many children feeling forgotten, powerless and invisible”.

“We will crack down on care providers making excessive profit, tackle unregistered and unsafe provision and ensure earlier intervention to keep families together and help children to thrive,” she added.

A key focus of the reforms is the rising cost of care for looked-after children, which the government said had “ballooned” from £3.1bn in 2009-10 to £7bn in 2022-23.

Photo: pla2na/Adobe Stock

This has been driven by a shortage of suitable placements located in the right areas, which some providers have been accused of exploiting to increase fees and extract undue levels of profit from children’s care.

In its 2022 report on the placements market, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) found that, among the largest 15 providers, profit margins averaged 22.6% in residential care and 19.4% in fostering.

It said this was higher than would be expected in a well-functioning market, though it rejected the case for banning or capping profits on the grounds that this would reduce incentives for providers to invest in services and further shrink supply.

Backing for regional care co-operatives

Concerns about profit have led the Labour government in Wales to issue legislation to restrict the making of profit from children’s care, with a long-term aim of eliminating it altogether.

Its counterpart in Westminster will largely follow the blueprint to tackle profit set out by the Conservatives in Stable Homes, including by creating regional care co-operatives (RCCs) to commission placements on behalf of member authorities.

Photo: momius/Adobe Stock

RCCs are currently being developed in two areas, Greater Manchester and the South East, where they will go live next year.

In its policy paper, Keeping Children Safe, Helping Families Thrive, the DfE said RCCs would “harness the collective buying power of individual local authorities”, improving value for money from commissioning, while also developing provision to fill gaps.

It said it would legislate to enable groups of councils to set up RCCs, with ministers also taking powers to direct them to do so or intervene if a co-operative was not performing at a required standard.

Boosting pricing transparency

In another echo of Stable Homes, the government said it would seek to fill gaps in councils’ data around care costs, to “enable them to negotiate effectively with providers to secure the best placement for children at the lowest possible cost”.

“We will engage with the sector to bring about greater cost and price transparency which will aid local authorities in challenging profiteering providers, as well as enabling greater central government oversight of the placements market,” it said.

However, to guard against these measures not engineering a reduction in profiteering, the government said it would legislate to obtain powers to cap profit levels from children’s care placements, which would be enacted if required.

The idea sparked concerns from provider representative body the Children’s Homes Association, which said it risked “serious unintended consequences”.

“The CHA supports efforts to eliminate profiteering, but this law will incentivise more providers to adopt offshore interest and debt-driven business models,” it warned.

Greater oversight of hardest to-replace providers

Another Stable Homes policy being taken forward by the Labour government is setting up a financial oversight regime for the hardest to replace providers, to avoid children’s care being disrupted by businesses failing.

These providers, up to parent company level, would have to supply the DfE with financial information to enable it to assess the viability of their whole organisations.

Credit: lovelyday12 / Adobe Stock

They would also have to develop contingency plans to ensure that they did not exit the market in a disorderly way, while the DfE would have enforcement powers to ensure compliance with the regime.

Regulating children’s home groups

The DfE also pledged to give Ofsted the power to investigate multiple children’s homes run by the same company. The regulator has longed called for this to enable it to scrutinise companies’ decision making in relation to issues such as admissions, ending placements, budgeting and staffing levels.

The DfE said that, despite some companies ran over 100 children’s homes, Ofsted could not hold them to account for organisational failings that affected children’s care.

Under its plans, the regulator would be able to request, and monitor the implementation of, provider-wider improvement plans and be given powers, such as fining or preventing further registrations by the group, to enforce compliance.

Ofsted welcomed the proposal, with national director for social care, Yvette Stanley, saying: The proposed powers will strengthen our ability to hold providers to account at group level. This will mean that we can secure widespread improvements for children if there are patterns of failure.”

Tackling unregistered provision

The DfE said it would also give Ofsted powers to tackle a “worrying” rise in the use of unregistered provision, particularly of children’s homes and supported accommodation.

In 2023-24, Ofsted opened cases on 1,109 potentially unregistered settings and found that 887 (87%) should have been registered (compared to 370 in 2022-23).

Under the plans, the regulator would be given powers to fine providers of unregistered provision, as an alternative to criminal prosecutions, enabling it to act more quickly against organisations.

This was also welcomed by Ofsted, with Stanley adding: “It is only right that we are given additional powers and resources to better tackle persistent offenders and put a stop to unscrupulous and profiteering providers, once and for all.”

Housing support for care leavers

The reform package also includes legislating to require all councils to provide any care leaver (up to the age of 25) whose welfare requires it with support to access and maintain accommodation, along with practical and emotional support from someone they trust.

Photo: AdobeStock/Monkey Business

This would be based on the current Staying Close programme, which the DfE is funding 47 councils to deliver in 2024-25, at a cost of £22m, and would be designed to tackle the lack of support experienced by care leavers on moving into independent living.

The plan to extend Staying Close nationwide was also proposed by the care review and set out in Stable Homes, Built on Love.

The DfE said the duty on councils would not come into force until three years after the legislation is passed, to give them sufficient time to develop the service.

Charity Become, which supports young care experienced people, said it was “a very welcome and important first step” but must not become “another postcode lottery”.

Multi-agency safeguarding teams

Outside of the care system, the government has pledged to introduce a requirement on councils to set up multi-agency child safeguarding teams, involving professionals from social care, police, health and education, and other services, where required.

They would be responsible for investigating child protection concerns and managing cases, and would be staffed by specialists from the various constituent agencies.

This adopts a recommendation from the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel’s 2022 report into the murders of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson.

That review found a “systemic flaw in the quality of multi-agency working”, with “an overreliance on single agency processes with superficial joint working and joint decision making”.

The panel’s proposed model of multi-agency safeguarding teams, along with the care review’s proposal for child protection cases to be held by specialist social workers, are being tested in the 10 families first for children pathfinder sites.

The DfE said the details of how the proposed teams would work would be based on the evaluation of the pathfinder, and councils and their partners would have time to prepare.

Annie Hudson, chair, Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel

In response to the plan, panel chair Annie Hudson said: “We believe that this will provide a crucial new lever for tackling some deep-seated perennial problems in safeguarding children.”

Other child protection measures

Other child protection measures include placing a duty on parents to seek local authority consent to home educate their child where the child is subject to a child protection enquiry or on a child protection plan.

The DfE also plans to introduce a unique identifier for every child, to promote better information sharing between professionals. This will be piloted before the relevant legislation is implemented.

Alongside this, it will introduce a duty that would provide “absolute clarity on the legal basis to share information for the purposes of safeguarding children”.

This is designed to tackle findings that practitioners lack confidence to share information without families’ consent when there is not clear evidence of harm, despite there being other lawful bases to do so.

Rollout of family group decision-making

Councils will also have to offer families in pre-proceedings a family group decision making (FGDM) meeting, enabling them to be involved in decisions about their children’s future, where this is in the child’s best interests.

This is based on the findings of a randomised controlled trial (RCT), commissioned by what works body Foundations, into the use of family group conferences – a particular form of FGDM – at pre-proceedings, which reported last year.

This found that children whose families were referred for a family group conference (FGC) were less likely to have had care proceedings issued (59%) compared to those not referred (72%) and were less likely to be in care one year later (36%) compared to those not referred (45%).

Photo: zinkevych/Fotolia

The DfE acknowledged that “there may be barriers for local authorities in implementing FGDM at scale, including financial constraints and challenges around the recruitment or training of staff”. But it said it hoped its ambition could be realised through investment and the sharing of best practice.

Families should be offered ‘tried and tested’ FGCs – charity

Foundations’ chief executive, Jo Casebourne, welcomed the move, adding: “This type of family-led approach helps to avoid costly, late-stage interventions, and ensures that children and families get effective support at the right time.”

The Family Rights Group (FRG), which runs an accreditation programme for family group conferences services, was also supportive, but said it was vital that families were offered FGCs.

“For this radical ambition to be achieved, the offer to families must be of a family-led, robustly evaluated approach that has been tried and tested in the UK and abroad, namely family group conferences,” said FRG chief executive Cathy Ashley.

“They operate to clear standards and reduce the likelihood of a child entering or remaining in care. For children who cannot remain at home, they enable prospective carers to be identified from within the family.”

Virtual school head role extended

The government also pledged to legislate to require councils to appoint an officer responsible for promoting the educational achievement of children on child in need plans, on child protection plans and in kinship arrangements.

This role is currently carried out on a non-statutory basis by virtual school heads, who have a statutory role to promote the educational achievement of looked-after children and provide educational advice and information in relation to former children in care.

The DfE said its proposal would “bring consistency to the deployment of the role” and “ensure that children with a social worker and those in kinship care are in school, safe and are learning”.

Payment by results scrapped for Supporting Families

In her statement to Parliament announcing the policy paper, Phillipson said the government would consolidate more than £400m of children’s social care funding within the local government finance settlement in 2025-26, to simply resourcing arrangements for councils.

As a first step, it has suspended the payment by results mechanism of the Supporting Families programme, under which families with multiple needs are provided with multi-agency support, co-ordinated by a lead practitioner, to resolve issues.

Under payment by results, most councils receive some money for the programme up front with the rest delivered based on the outcomes achieved for families.

The Association of Directors of Children’s Services welcomed the decision to scrap the approach.

ADCS president for 2024-25, Andy Smith (photo supplied by the ADCS)

“[It] is a hugely positive step in the right direction towards ensuring that the limited funds in the system are used in the best interest of children and families, rather than on the mechanisms of tracking and reporting on this vital work,” said ADCS president Andy Smith.

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has announced increased tax relief for foster and shared lives carers, improved support for care leavers and enhanced help for disabled people to enter the workplace, in his Spring Budget today.

However, social care leaders have criticised the lack of funding for core services for the coming years, while the statement also did not provide further detail about public sector pay settlements for 2023-24.

While many foster and other carers do not pay tax on the payments they receive from their provider for their role due to the so-called qualifying care relief (formerly ‘foster care relief’) scheme, the benefit this provides has been frozen for 20 years.

This has prompted concerns among fostering leaders in the light of evidence that half of carers had considered quitting their role due to the impact of the cost of living crisis.

More generous tax relief for carers

Hunt announced today that the earnings threshold for the scheme would rise from £10,000 to £18,140 per household from April this year, an amount that is pro rated based on how much of the relevant tax year the carers have been approved to carry out their role.

At the same time, the extra relief that carers receive for each person they care for will rise from £200 to £375 per week for each child under 11, and from £250 to £450 for older children and adults. The package will cost £15m in its first year of implementation, and all the figures will be uprated each year in line with the government’s consumer prices index measure of inflation.

The qualifying care scheme is applicable to anyone who has a child or adult placed with them by a local authority, Northern Irish health and social care trust, fostering agency or shared lives service, and encompasses staying put provision for former foster children, and kinship and parent and child fostering placements.

In the case of foster carers, the package represents a further boost following the Department for Education’s announcement that national minimum allowances in England would rise by 12.43% for 2023-24, above the rate of inflation. Those in Wales will increase by 5.5%.

‘Recognising the value of foster carers’

Sarah Anderson, a foster carer and founder of information service FosterWiki, welcomed today’s news on LinkedIn.

“We are pleased to see the government taking such a positive step forward in recognising the value of foster carers,” she said. “This will be a much needed boost for retention and recruitment but we must not rest on our laurels.”

Charities the Fostering Network and Kinship also welcomed the changes and the benefits they would bring unrelated and kinship foster carers, while Association of Directors of Children’s Services president Steve Crocker said the ADCS hoped it “will encourage more people who believe they have the right skills to foster to come forward so all of those children who need a foster placement find one”.

The Budget also included a boost for the staying close scheme, under which care leavers formerly in residential settings are provided with move-on accommodation and practical and emotional support from a member of staff from their former children’s home or someone they trust.

Boost for staying close scheme for care leavers

Funding will increase by £15m to £23.1m annually for each of the next two years, which Hunt said would enable around half (76) of local authorities to deliver it by March 2025. Fifteen councils were funded to pilot the scheme in 2022-23, in addition to five who were enabled to do so, along with three private providers, from 2017-18.

This was also welcomed by the ADCS, for whom Crocker said that the scheme helped “equip young people leaving care with the skills needed to live alone and navigate adulthood, such as how to cook, budget and access support”.

Hunt said the measure would help more care leavers into employment, in line with one of the central objectives of the budget, to reduce the number of adults currently out of work. This includes an estimated 2.5m who are economically inactive due to long-term sickness.

To tackle this, Hunt announced a number of measures to help disabled people into work, alongside a Department for Work and Pensions white paper on health and disability. This government’s proposals include:

• Introducing a programme, known as universal support, to match people who want to work to existing vacancies, and resourcing the necessary training and workplace support to enable them to stay in work – backed by funding of £90m in 2023-24 and £250m in 2024-25.
• Increasing support from work coaches for people with health conditions on employment and support allowance (ESA) or universal credit (UC), with funding of £90m in 2023-24 and £145m in 2024-25.
• Scrapping the work capability assessment that determines eligibility for ESA and UC with limited capability for work or work-related activity. Instead, there will just be one functional assessment for disabled people, that for personal independence payment (PIP), the separate benefit for working-age adults designed to help meet the additional costs of their care and mobility needs. This responds to research that disabled people felt the two assessments overlapped and being repeatedly assessed.
• Replacing UC for people with limited capability for work-related activity with a new UC health element, which people will receive automatically if they are eligible for PIP and UC. To incentivise people in this group – who currently have no work-related responsibilities – to take a job, the health element will not be stopped if they do so. Instead, it will taper away as their earnings rise, as with UC more generally.

Disappointment over lack of social care funding

But while the Spring Budget also announced significant extra funding for defence and childcare, there was no boost in core funding for children’s and adults’ services over what was set out in the autumn statement in November, to the disappointment of sector leaders.

Association of Directors of Adult Social Services president Sarah McClinton described it as a “missed opportunity”, saying that the resources announced in November “were welcome, but nowhere near enough to correct the underfunding of adult social care that’s been going on for decades”.

She added: “We need a long-term, fully funded plan that meets the needs of older and disabled people and their carers and addresses the staffing crisis in social care. We estimate that means another £7bn this year, and £9bn next year.”

For the Local Government Association, chairman James Jamieson said that, given the Budget’s ambitions to support people back into work, it was “disappointing there is no further investment in adult social care, public health and children’s services, which all play a vital role in supporting economic growth and helping people back into work, alongside boosting people’s health and wellbeing”.

The British Association of Social Workers, meanwhile, bemoaned a lack of action on tackling poverty – for example, by heeding its call to extend, from 60 to 180 days, the pause on action from creditors for people in debt provided by the breathing space scheme – and on investment in social work recruitment, retention and development.

‘Choosing between eating, heating and social care’

And the chief executive of social care advice provider Access Social Care, Kari Gerstheimer, warned that the lack of additional funding for the sector came with “too many of the working age disabled people, older people and carers we support are choosing between food, heating and social care”.

Carers UK chief executive Helen Walker said that, with adult social care vacancies rising by 52% to 165,000 in the year to March 2022, the “failure to set out a workforce plan for social care during this Budget is a massive missed opportunity”, with the sector “at risk of collapse”.

From the care provider sector, Care England chief executive Martin Green also expressed his disappointment, saying that “against the backdrop of a workforce crisis and rising vacancies, the rising cost of living and increasing energy costs, the stabilisation of the adult social care sector should be the government’s priority in the coming months”

The Budget also did not deal with the issue of public sector pay for 2023-24.

Social worker pay latest

Most public sector social workers in England and Wales are covered by the National Joint Council for Local Government Services, whose employers have offered staff a rise of £1,925 or 3.88%, for those currently on £49,950 or above. The increase would be worth 3.88% to 6.4% for social workers. But despite employers saying it was their “full and final offer”, it has been rejected by union leaders, who are now balloting their members on the proposal.

For social workers in the NHS, the Department of Health and Social Care has suggested that any pay rise should not top 3.5%. In its evidence to the NHS Pay Review Body, which will propose this year’s increase for government approval, the DHSC said increases of above this level risked increasing government borrowing or requiring cuts to public services at a time when “sustainable public finances are vital in the fight against inflation”.

For Cafcass staff in England, pay rises for 2023-24 will be determined by civil service rules, which are yet to be published, but are likely to be bound by the same 3.5% limit.

On the back of these rules, social workers and other staff working for the family courts body received a pay rise below that given to local government colleagues for the sixth time in the past seven years in 2022-23, a trend that has prompted Cafcass chief executive Jacky Tiotto to warn of an exodus of practitioners.