“Flawed statistics” are undermining councils’ understanding of outcomes for children in care, meaning they are unable to judge whether they are securing the right kinds of provision.

That was the message from the South East Regional Care Co-operative (RCC) – one of two bodies set up to test the region-wide commissioning of placements – in a briefing paper on the data context for children in care services.

Like its counterpart in Greater Manchester, the South East RCC has been tasked by the Department for Education (DfE) with analysing care needs across the region and commissioning provision – including by establishing its own – to meet gaps, in the context of a nationwide shortages of placements.

In the briefing paper, the RCC, which is working on behalf of 18 authorities across the region, said existing statistics on the care system, produced by the DfE, did not enable it to answer key questions about the care that should be provided.

‘Flawed statistics’

For example, while DfE data showed the proportion of children placed outside their home authority, it did not cover the proportion of placements that were outside the region.

Data on children’s educational attainment or their self-reported mental health did not provide information on what they thought of the care they were receiving or about what their lives were like, the RCC added.

“From our placement statistics we don’t know how often we’re securing the kind of placement we ideally wanted to secure,” the briefing paper said.

“When we try to dig into the detail of any particular question, we find that our detailed statistics are flawed, because they look at such small numbers of children as to make changes statistically insignificant.”

Echoes of CMA report on sector

The findings echo those of the Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) 2022 report on provision for looked-after children, which concluded that available data was insufficient to answer questions such as whether there was sufficient supply of specialised provision to meet a particular type of need in a particular location.

“One particular shortcoming is the lack of consistent data on whether the right type of placement in the right location was available or whether a placement was a second-best option,” said the CMA.

“We understand this information is collected within local authorities’ procurement tools but often not in a structured way that would allow analysis. This information would be vital for understanding how well local authorities are meeting their [duty to take steps to secure sufficient accommodation locally for children in their care].”

The RCCs in the South East and Greater Manchester are due to take responsibility for placements in their region from their member local authorities later this year.

Plan to roll out regional care co-operatives

Meanwhile, the government – through the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill – is legislating to enable it to require two or more local authorities to set up RCCs, to take responsibility for functions including:

• Assessing current and future requirements for the accommodation of looked-after children.
• Producing strategies for meeting those requirements.
• Commissioning placements to meet the needs of looked-after children.
• Recruiting and supporting local authority foster carers.
• Developing, or facilitating the development of, new provision to accommodate looked-after children.

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Councils and partner agencies are to be required to establish multi-agency child protection teams, under legislation to overhaul children’s social care.

The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill would also allow for the regulation of agency work in children’s social care and the creation of a new type of placement in which a child could be deprived of liberty.

Other planned reforms include requiring authorities to offer families a family group decision making meeting before making a care or supervision order application, to enable the network around the child to discuss and make proposals regarding their welfare.

The proposals are largely those set out by the Department for Education (DfE) in a policy paper last month.

Multi-agency child protection teams

The creation of multi-agency child protection teams was 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”.

On the back of this report, and that of the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, the previous government selected 10 areas to test the value of multi-agency child protection teams, alongside other measures, under the families first for children pathfinder. The measure in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill will be part of a national rollout of the pathfinder.

Under the bill, councils, chief officers of police and relevant NHS integrated care boards (ICB) must set up one or more multi-agency child protection teams for the relevant local authority area.

The teams’ composition and role

Each team would consist of at least one social worker and educational professional, put forward by the relevant director of children’s services, a health professional nominated by the relevant ICB and a police officer chosen by the chief of police.

The government will specify requirements for these roles, for example in relation to qualifications and experience, in regulations under the legislation. This is likely to include requirements for lead child protection practitioners, the specialist social workers who form part of the multi-agency teams being tested through the pathfinder.

The legislation states that the teams’ role would include supporting councils in carrying out their duty to investigate child protection concerns, under section 47 of the Children Act 1989, along with other duties prescribed in regulations.

However, based on the pathfinder, it is likely that the role of the multi-agency teams will be to carry out section 47 investigations and other core child protection functions.

What else is in the bill?

Other measures in the bill include:

• Enabling the government to regulate councils’ use of agency workers in children’s social care, which would cover both social worker and non-social worker roles. This would be based on rules brought into force in October 2024, which only cover social workers.
• Mandating councils to offer a ‘family group decision making’ meeting when they are seriously considering applying for a care or supervision order, to give families an opportunity to come together and make a proposal in response to concerns regarding the child’s welfare.
• Providing a statutory framework to authorise a deprivation of liberty for children who need it to keep them safe, in accommodation other than a secure children’s home, designed with the primary purpose of care and treatment.
• Enabling the government to require councils to join together regionally to carry out their functions for accommodating looked-after children. Such regional care co-operatives are currently being tested in two areas.
• Empowering Ofsted to subject parent companies to an improvement plan if any of their subsidiaries are suspected of failing to meet the required standards in two or more regulated services that they run, such as children’s homes.
• Enabling Ofsted to impose fines on companies for breaches of care standards, including for running unregistered children’s homes.
• Setting up a financial oversight regime, run by the DfE, for the largest and most significant providers of children’s social care services, which would require them to provide information to the DfE on their finances, including in relation to their sustainability.
• Giving the government the power, through regulations, to cap the profits of non-local authority providers of children’s homes or fostering agencies.
• Requiring local authorities to publish a local offer setting out their support for kinship families.
• Requiring councils to provide to eligible care leavers up to the age of 25 with support with finding and maintaining accommodation and accessing services where their welfare requires it
• Automatically including education and childcare agencies in multi-agency safeguarding arrangements.
• Making provision for the specification of a single unique identifier for each child, to aid information sharing between agencies.
• Extending the role of virtual school heads to promoting the educational achievement of children in need and children in kinship care on a statutory basis.
• Requiring councils to have and maintain children not in school registers and provide support to home-educating parents.
• Empowering local authorities to require that children subject to child protection processes attend school when school is in their best interests.

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The government has selected two groups of councils to test the commissioning and delivery of looked-after children’s placements at a regional level.

Greater Manchester and the South East have been chosen as pathfinders for so-called regional care co-operatives (RCCs), under which individual councils pool their resources and plan placements centrally.

RCCs were proposed by the previous Conservative government – based on a recommendation from the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care – in its Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy published last year.

They are designed to give councils – collectively – greater clout to shape services across their regions and ensure sufficient high-quality placements for children in care, in the context of widespread concern about current provision.

This relates to a shift in provision from foster to residential care, the increasing cost of placements to councils, high profit levels, particularly among the biggest providers, the mismatch between need and where children’s homes are set up and the lack of services for children with the most complex needs, including those needing secure care.

Role of regional co-operatives

The DfE expects the pathfinder RCCs to perform the following functions:

• Carrying out regional data analysis and forecasting future needs of homes for children in care, in partnership with health and justice services.
• Developing and publishing a regional sufficiency strategy setting out current provision and action to fill gaps.
• Working as one customer with providers to shape the market, address local needs, improve value for money and commission care places.
• Recruiting foster carers through a regional recruitment support hub and improving the support offer to both new and existing foster parents.
• Developing new regional provision to increase capacity where gaps have been identified, including relating to children currently placed out of area.

The pathfinder RCCs are due to go live next summer, existing in shadow form until then. The South East has each been given £1.95m and Greater Manchester £1.5m to develop the co-operative, while both have received a further £5m to fund additional placements.

In the South East, West Sussex County Council has taken on the role of lead authority on behalf of the other 18 local authorities, which will involve employing staff and receiving payments from the DfE. Its director of children’s services, Lucy Butler, seconded to lead the RCC.

Providing ‘loving, local homes for children’ in South East

In a post on LinkedIn to mark her appointment as director of the South East RCC, Butler said it was “all about making sure we provide loving, local homes for our children. We are excited to work with local authorities, health colleagues , providers, children and young people to work out what needs to change to make this a reality for ALL our children.”

In its pathfinder bid, the South East authorities said that, besides the DfE requirements, they would also look to use the RCC to set up an academy to develop the region’s children’s home workforce. They also planned to take a region-wide approach to managing placements for unaccompanied children, to relieve pressures on Kent council.

The Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA), which consists of the 10 local authorities and regional mayor Andy Burnham, said that the region’s project would be managed collaboratively councils’ directors of children’s services.

Earlier this year, the GMCA launched a “shaping care fund” for voluntary and community bodies to support care experienced children and young people to engage in the development of the RCC.

Existing Greater Manchester work to tackle placement gap

The Greater Manchester RCC will build on existing GMCA-led work to tackle the insufficiency of placements in the region, including Project Skyline, which is designed to develop new children’s home capacity across the region for specific groups of children.

Both pathfinders will be supported by public services consultancy Mutual Ventures, which won a £1.7m DfE contract in May to perform this role and also provide national support with forecasting, commissioning and market shaping in relation to children’s care placements.

The pathfinders were selected in the summer, a year after the then government invited bids from regions to take part. The time taken is likely to reflect significant scepticism among sector bodies about the impact of the reform.

Sector scepticism about RCCs

In September 2023, the DfE reported that 48% of respondents to its consultation on Stable Homes, Built on Love had raised potential difficulties about the model, including the remoteness of RCCs from children and small care providers.

The Association of Directors of Children’s Services had previously warned that there was “no evidence” that RCCs would address pressures on the placement market, creating them would be “costly and time consuming” and they risked triggering a mass exist of providers.

In response, the DfE committed to working with the sector to co-design RCCs and pledged to develop them on a “staged basis”, with a set of minimum expectations established for the two pathfinders.

Labour stance on reforms 

Meanwhile, it is still unclear what stance the new Labour government will take on RCCs and the wider Stable Homes, Built on Love agenda.

On 9 September, children’s minister Janet Daby was asked by fellow Labour MP Josh MacAlister – author of the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, which formed the blueprint for Stable Homes – about the government’s plans.

In response, Daby said ministers were considering MacAlister’s review as part of their reform programme for children’s social care, which includes the forthcoming Children’s Wellbeing Bill.

“Children’s social care is a key priority for this government, evidenced by our commitment to the Children’s Wellbeing Bill announced in the King’s Speech in July”, she said. “A full programme for delivery will be produced in order to support that commitment.”

Legislation ‘to strengthen regulation of social care’

The bill is designed to keep children “safe, happy and rooted in their communities and schools by strengthening multi-agency child protection and safeguarding arrangements”.

Also, in line with Labour’s election manifesto, children’s minister Janet Daby said this week that the government aimed to “strengthen the regulation of the sector to return children’s social care to delivering high quality outcomes for looked after children at a sustainable cost to the taxpayer”.

Incoming Association of Directors of Children’s Services president Andy Smith is passionate about social work’s potential to improve children’s lives.

While such a belief is commonplace among senior managers in local authority children’s services, for Smith, it is personal. He was one of those children whose lives were transformed by a social worker.

Smith was taken into care as a baby, spending the first 11 years of his life in a foster home before those same carers adopted him.

From the age of seven, up until his adoption, he had the same social worker, with whom he remained in contact into his 20s.

‘My social worker was pivotal in shaping my career’

It was a relationship that was pivotal in his decision to join the profession some 30 years ago.

“I had a really positive experience of social workers,” he says. “My social worker was really pivotal in shaping my career and my aspirations and dreams.”

This was not just based on his experiences as a child but also on what he learned reading his case files while training to be a social worker.

“It showed there was lots of good practice going on,” he says. “Even though it’s a long time ago, there are lots of similarities with what we talk about in terms of good relationship-based social work.”

A passion for social work

His positive experience is one he shares with the social workers he oversees in Derby council as its strategic director of people, a role that encompasses the statutory positions of director of children’s services (DCS) and director of adult social services (DASS).

“It’s given me a real passion for social work and the good that it can effect in people lives,” he says. “It feels very instinctive for me to talk about the power of social work, even 40 years later. It’s definitely shaped who I am.”

It is also a reason why, despite having been a senior manager for almost two decades, he maintains his social work registration.

“I’m very proud to be a registered social worker,” he says. “Even though I don’t practise on the ground, I keep connected to practise.”

Being a director ‘is a tough gig’

As one of a declining breed of “twin-hatted” directors, Smith has a lot on his plate, managing budgetary, service, workforce and political pressures across children’s and adults’ services.

He is helped, he says, by working for a “supportive organisation” in which “adults’ and children’s services are a corporate priority”.

But with 42 of the then 152 local authorities having had a change of DCS in 2022-23 and a report last year highlighting the many pressures on those holding the position, he admits that being a director is a “tough gig”.

“The context of operating as a DCS is something that feels as pressured now, if not more so than before,” he says. “One of my priorities [as president] is ensuring we support DCSs.”

Promoting greater diversity

As he made clear in his inaugural speech as president, this includes promoting greater racial diversity at director level.

Just 6% of DCSs were black or from a non-white ethnic minority as of 31 March 2023, compared with 18% of the population of England and Wales in the 2021 census and 25% of statutory children’s social workers in England, as of September 2023. 

In his speech, he said promoting a more diverse workforce was an ADCS priority and that it was committed to “highlighting, challenging and addressing issues of disproportionality, discrimination and systemic barriers that limit opportunity where they exist”.

Like his two immediate predecessors, Steve Crocker and John Pearce, Smith comes to the presidency at a time of great flux for children’s social care in England.

Crocker’s tenure coincided with the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care’s final report and the Department for Education’s response, through its Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy to reform the sector. Pearce’s term saw the ADCS seeking to influence the DfE’s approach to implementing the reforms.

A coming general election

This will continue under Smith, who will also be the president that takes association into and through the next general election, which will most likely take place in the autumn.

With Labour predicted to win, it is not clear how children’s social care policy would change as a result. Chief social worker for children and families Isabelle Trowler said recently that she did not feel the election would make a difference to the trajectory of the Stable Homes reforms (see box).

‘Lack of urgency’ to reform social care

The ADCS broadly supports the reforms and their aims: investing in early support for families and in kinship carers so fewer children need child protection interventions or to go into care; boosting the supply of care placements to tackle the current insufficiency; and improving the quality and sufficiency the social work workforce to improve relationship-based practice with families.

Its key arguments with the DfE are that the reforms lack sufficient urgency at a time when councils are struggling to keep the current system running.

“[Stable Homes] makes the case robustly that if we fail to invest in early help, we will see escalation of cost,” Smith says.

However, currently, the key reform to enable this – family help – is being tested in three areas, with seven to follow later this year. Smith says it is imperative for the approach to be tested as quickly as possible “so that we can demonstrate to the Treasury that there’s an absolute case for investment because that will lead to better outcomes and better value for money for the public purse”.

A rising care population with increased complexity of need

Trowler has said that the key success measure for the reforms will be a “massive cut” in the size of the care population. However, not only has that population grown in each of the last 15 years as councils lose foster carers and the secure home sector shrinks, but they are also working with more young people experiencing complex needs who highly tailored placements.

Placement insufficiency is driving significant cost.

Despite councils having budgeted 11% more in real terms for children’s social care in 2023-24 than 2022-23, County Councils Network research last autumn found that the 41 shire authorities alone were facing a combined £319m overspend during that financial year. 

Meanwhile, council spending on independent children’s homes more than doubled from 2015-16 to 2021-22, according to research by market analysts Revolution Consulting.

Stable Homes, Built on Love includes a number of measures designed to tackle the issue, including recruiting more foster carers – which the government is backing with £27m from 2023-25 – while the government has recently announced further funding to build children’s homes.

‘More action needed on care placements’

However, the ADCS is sceptical about the DfE’s key placements reform – creating regional care co-operatives to take over responsibility for commissioning – and, in any case, this is also years from implementation, with the department yet to announce the two pathfinder areas that will test the change.

On this too, Smith insists more urgent action is required.

“We need a properly resourced plan to tackle what is a placement sufficiency crisis and some of it cannot wait for some of the medium- and long-term plans in Stable Homes.”

In an echo of his presidential predecessors, he is also that this requires action on “profiteering” by large private equity-backed providers. He says that the £310m in profit made from publicly-funded children’s social care by 19 of the 20 biggest placement providers in 2021-22 (source: Revolution Consulting) “doesn’t feel right”.

Tackling ‘profiteering’

“I’m talking about a relatively small amount of providers who are generating a huge amount of profit,” he says. “If the government were minded there are things they could do to manage and sort that.”

In his presidential speech, he expressed support for care review lead Josh MacAlister’s call for a windfall tax on the profits of the largest providers. Pearce has previously called for national rules for the provider market, including ensuring that they charge a fair cost for care.

The government is not deaf to these calls, having promised to bring forward measures to combat profiteering in the children’s homes market later this year.

The DfE has already acted on ADCS calls to tackle what the association also described as “profiteering” in the social work agency market, through the national rules due to come into force in the summer of this year.

Qualified support for new agency social work rules

Smith strongly supports this with one caveat: the ADCS opposes the DfE’s decision to go back on its original proposal to ban outright the use of agency project teams. The practice of some agencies restricting the supply of locums to such teams, driving up costs, is directors’ chief bugbear with this market.

Under the DfE’s revised plans, project teams will be permitted but their practice must be fully under councils’ management, with the engagement of each individual worker subject to all the other national rules, including regional price caps on what authorities pay agencies.

However, in his speech, Smith said that there were “no benefits of the project team model being deployed in statutory case holding work other than the opportunities it provides for agencies to generate unacceptably high profits”.

He tells Community Care: “I think that’s something we will need to monitor the impact of going forward. It didn’t go as far as we would have liked but we’re in a better place than we were.”

Three councils have been selected to test giving responsibility for child protection cases to specialist social workers over the next two years.

Dorset, Lincolnshire and Wolverhampton will also trial merging targeted early help with child in need teams within a new family help service, as part of the Department for Education (DfE’s) proposed children’s social care reforms.

The three authorities are the first group of an expected 12 “pathfinders” testing out the families first for children model set out in the DfE’s draft strategy, Stable Homes, Built on Love, issued in February.

Based on the proposals of the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, this would involve:

• Establishing family help services to provide families in need with multidisciplinary support designed to resolve the issues they face without the need for more intervention, reduce stigma and remove the bureaucracy of stepping cases up and down between targeted early help and child in need.
• Enabling practitioners other than social workers to hold child in need cases – as defined by section 17 of the Children Act 1989 – removing the prohibition on them doing so set by statutory safeguarding guidance Working Together to Safeguard Children.
• Having specialist child protection lead practitioners co-work cases with family help teams from the point a local authority initiates a child protection enquiry.

Concerns over safeguarding risks and retention

The reforms are controversial, with the British Association of Social Workers and Ofsted having raised concerns about the safeguarding risks arising from removing the requirement for social workers to hold child in need cases.

Meanwhile, both Ofsted and the Association of Directors of Children’s Services have voiced misgivings about the impact of the lead child protection practitioner role on social work retention, in the context of mounting vacancy rates in local authority children’s services.

In its response to Stable Homes, Built on Love, the ADCS said social workers had shared concerns about “the high stakes nature of such a role, particularly if a tragedy sadly occurs”.

“High end child protection work is hard to sustain over long periods of time, it is emotionally taxing and there are few guarantees it will result in practitioners staying in frontline practice,” it added.

The three pathfinder authorities are all rated good (Dorset and Wolverhampton) or outstanding (Lincolnshire) by Ofsted and all have social work vacancy rates below the national average of 20%, as of September 2022, with Dorset’s being 13.8%, Lincolnshire’s 15.6% and Wolverhampton’s 17.6%.

In relation to the number of child protection plans per 10,000 children, as of March 2022, Lincolnshire’s (25.6) was well below the national average of 42.1, Wolverhampton’s was around the England-wide figure (42.3) and Dorset’s was above it (47.7).

Family network pilots

The DfE has also selected seven councils to pilot the use of so-called family network support packages to enable wider family members to step in to prevent children entering the care system when there are risks to them at home. This was also proposed by the care review.

Brighton and Hove, Sunderland, Gateshead and Telford and Wrekin will start their family network pilots this month (July), and Staffordshire, Hartlepool and Hammersmith and Fulham will do so in spring 2024.

The news comes with a recent evaluation having found that using family group conferences (FGCs) – a form of family network decision making – reduced the risk of children going into care 12 months after families entered pre-proceedings.

Meanwhile, councils would be encouraged to refer families to FGCs from early help onwards, under proposed changes to Working Together, which are currently out to consultation.

The 12 families first for children pathfinders and seven family network pilots will receive £45m in funding overall up to March 2025, with £7.8m of this allocated to the latter.

ADCS president John Pearce said the announcement was a “positive step”, but said it was imperative for the learning from the pilots and pathfinders to be shared with the rest of the sector as quickly as possible.

“The earlier we work with, and provide support to, vulnerable children and families to help them overcome the issues they face, and to stay together safely where possible the less impact these challenges will have on their lives but also on society,” said Pearce. “While the investment announced today is welcome, we continue to need a long-term equitable funding solution for children’s services so that all children and families can thrive, wherever they live.”

DfE still looking for regions to test care co-operatives

The department is still looking for two regions to test its plan to regionalise the commissioning of care placements within so-called regional care co-operatives, which would be collectives of local authorities.

RCCs are designed to overcome the challenge of individual councils being too small – and having too few children – to be able to meaningfully shape the services providers offer and ensure that they meet need and are value for money.

The DfE has said that, by operating at much greater scale than councils, RCCs would be much better able to forecast need, and commission sufficient placements, in the right places, to meet it.

It would also be much easier to share learning, good practice and information about the cost and quality of providers between 20 RCCs, compared with 153 councils, improving the quality of commissioning.

However, the ADCS said last month that, while there were “varying degrees of interest in taking up a RCC pathfinder opportunity”, at present, “no region seems to be interested in adopting the approach as outlined by DfE”.

In a separate paper, the association voiced “significant reservations” about the proposal’s capacity to address the challenge of there being insufficient placements of the right kind and quality for children in care.

The association said creating RCCs would be “costly and time consuming” and “may result in a mass exist of providers”, such was the current fragility of the care placements market.

The DfE said the RCC pathfinders would “enable a test and learn approach to find the most effective way of implementing this reform, doing so in conjunction with local government and the children’s social care sector”.

The last few years have seen a plethora of reports about the lack of appropriate placements for children in care and the dire outcomes that have followed.

These include children and young being placed far from loved-ones and social networks, or in unsuitable, and sometimes unlawful, accommodation, and enduring multiple placement breakdowns. Those with the most complex needs have often being the worst affected.

These have been accompanied by concerns about councils facing spiralling costs for such placements and some – particularly large – providers making excessive profits by taking advantage of the shortage of provision and authorities’ lack of choice.

Regional commissioning plan

To tackle these issues, the Department for Education (DfE) has accepted the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care’s recommendation to regionalise placement commissioning, through the establishment of regional care co-operatives (RCCs).

RCCs – of which there would be 20 following implementation – would take over their member councils’ responsibilities for placing children in care, and would be complemented by a national body supporting councils with forecasting demand and the procurement of care from providers.

This function –  recommended by the Competition and Markets Authority in its report last year on the children’s social care market – may be folded into RCCs over time, the DfE suggested in its recently published draft strategy for the sector.

Providing greater scale than councils

RCCs are designed to overcome the challenge of individual councils being too small – and having too few children – to be able to meaningfully shape the services providers offer and ensure that they meet need and are value for money.

The DfE said that, by operating at much greater scale than councils, RCCs, supported by the national body, would be much better able to forecast need, and commission sufficient placements, in the right places, to meet it.

It would also be much easier to share learning, good practice and information about the cost and quality of providers between 20 RCCs, compared with 152 councils, improving the quality of commissioning.

This would reduce excess profit making and improve outcomes for children by making it more likely that they would be in a placement that meets their needs, said the DfE.

Co-operatives to face Ofsted checks

In time, RCCs would be inspected by Ofsted, to hold them to account for providing sufficient, high-quality placements.

As with the rest of their reforms, the DfE is not rushing ahead with implementation, but plans to establish two pathfinder RCCs next year.

But the department is clear that this is the way forward, with the pathfinders designed to shape how RCCs are implemented, not whether.

So what does the evidence say about their prospects?

Mixed history 

Councils working together across regions to commission care placements is nothing new. However, several reports have found issues with these approaches.

A 2015 study by Oxford Brookes University for the DfE identified 35 consortia or partnerships involved in commissioning care placements, encompassing the majority of councils. Most operated framework agreements, which defined service specifications and prices for providers who signed up.

The report found that, while consortia had generated savings for member authorities, both commissioners and providers acknowledged there was considerable scope for improvement. Procurement and monitoring activities were seen as particularly “bureaucratic and wasteful”.

Earlier call to require regional commissioning

A year later, Sir Martin Narey’s independent review of residential care for the DfE found councils could be obtaining “significantly greater savings” through consortia-based commissioning.

Foreshadowing the care review’s recommendations last year, Narey recommended the department require councils “to come together into large consortia for the purpose of obtaining significant discounts from private and voluntary sector providers”.

On the back of this, the department funded two projects, both in London, through its innovation programme, to test the benefits of regional commissioning.

However, an evaluation of one of these projects found that fewer providers than expected had made bids to join its proposed framework agreement, and those that had had offered prices higher than the market rates. Several providers reported that their preference was to offer placements to councils through unplanned spot purchases, where they could set their own fees.

“The findings highlight a tension between the interests of local authorities in securing in-borough, suitable and more cost effective placements, and the business interests of independent placement providers,” found the overarching evaluation of the second round of innovation programme funding, published in 2020.

Lack of provider sign-up

More recently, a 2022 study by What Works for Children’s Social Care found that, while most councils were part of a regional or sub-regional commissioning framework, several said these did not help them secure local placements or reduce reliance on spot purchasing. As with the innovation programme project, the key issue was lack of provider sign-up.

And in its report on social care last year, the CMA found that councils “can struggle to collaborate successfully due to risk aversion, budgetary constraints, differences in governance, and difficulties aligning priorities and sharing costs”. It concluded this was unlikely to change without action by central government.

One clear difference between RCCs and their predecessor regional commissioning initiatives is that they would be mandatory and universal, following their rollout. Neither councils, nor providers, would be able to opt out, and providers would have to deal with the RCC as a whole, not individual authorities.

This should tackle at least some of the issues highlighted in past reports.

Several years until full implementation

However, with the two RCC pathfinders only due to start work in spring 2024 and legislation required to roll out the system to the rest of the country, full implementation is several years away. Several sector bodies have raised the question of how immediate placement pressures will be addressed in the meantime.

While supporting the pathfinder approach to RCCs, the Local Government Association said: “We do not believe that RCCs will be able to address the issue of insufficient placements quickly, particularly for those children with the most complex needs, and therefore call on the department to work with councils and the NHS to improve sufficiency swiftly rather than waiting for RCCs to deliver results.

“This is imperative; too many children are not living in the right home for their needs and those children cannot wait for action to be taken.”

Proposals unlikely to tackle ‘dysfunctional market’

Children’s charity representative body Children England questioned what action would be taken in relation to non-pathfinder areas over the coming years.

“The fact that selected areas will be able to voluntarily form RCCs, and will receive both set-up and capital resource from central government to do so, while so many other areas of the country won’t, simply cannot be described as a decisive intervention to reform the whole dysfunctional care market,” it said.

Fostering agency TACT, meanwhile, while supportive of RCCs as an idea, raised concerns that the pathfinders may come to nothing.

“Any pilots must be part of a wider plan that clearly signals when the legislation needed to enact RCCs more widely will be introduced,” it said. “Too many pilots peter out, implementing pathfinders does make sense, but must be part of a wider implementation plan that makes clear the direction of travel and timescales for this.”

More immediate measures to boost placements

The DfE said it recognised the urgency of the need to tackle the insufficiency of placements.

Its key measures prior to RCC implementation are the existing programme to invest £259m in building children’s homes, from 2022-25, and a £27m increase for foster care recruitment and retention, over the next two years.

“This will boost fostering capacity and build an evidence base on how to effectively recruit and retain foster carers, building towards fostering being subsumed into RCCs across England,” it said.

Whether these measures prove sufficient is open to question; they will also take time to have an effect on the supply of placements.

However, besides timescales, there are more fundamental criticisms of RCCs.

Concerns over remote decision making for children

The DfE’s view is that RCCs’ greater ability to shape the market would result in more children being placed closer to home.

“No matter where children are from, at the heart of this approach, it is crucial that children live close to their family, friends and school,” it said. “A regional way of working should improve, not impede, this.”

When they were first proposed by the care review, the LGA warned about decision-making becoming more remote from children’s needs as a result.

“Locally-led solutions, rather than structures imposed from above, allow councils to build on existing relationships and respond to local contexts,” it said.

In a statement following the publication of the DfE strategy, it reiterated warnings about RCCs “adding an additional layer of bureaucracy to the system”.

Similar concerns were raised in December by some members of the care review’s evidence group, a collective of academics and researchers whose remit was to advise on the evidence base for its recommendations.

Warnings over structural change

In a blog post, they warned that “care will need to be taken that these structural reforms do not dilute local accountability mechanisms”.

The group also pointed to the risks inherent in structural change more generally, stressing the need to ensure RCCs do not become “an expensive distraction”.

A model for this sort of change is provided by the creation of regional adoption agencies (RAAs) over the past seven years.

Precedent of regional adoption agencies

In their blog post, the care review evidence group members pointed to the 2022 evaluation of the creation of RAAs, which identified a “complicated picture” in terms of their impact.

It found that RAAs appeared to have sped up the time taken to place a child for adoption, relative to performance by councils who were then outside regional structures.

However there had been a decrease in the percentage of children with a placement order who were subsequently placed with an adoptive family, relative to local authority-led adoption services. The creation of RAAs, it said, had caused “short-term disruption” that had slowed down adopter recruitment, though this factor had receded over time.

The Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies (CVAA) said it was “extremely concerned” about the plan for RCCs on the basis of the experience of implementing RAAs.

Risks of ‘loss of valuable expertise’

In its response to the care review, it said that “one of the most concerning consequences of the RAA programme has been the removal of adoption expertise from LA social work teams into RAAs, which may be a significant factor in why fewer children are having adoption chosen as their permanency plan”.

“There is a serious risk of RCCs following the same route as RAAs, and therefore compounding the loss of valuable expertise from their care planning teams, without an explicit plan to avoid this happening,” it added.

On behalf of independent fostering agencies, the Nationwide Association of Fostering Providers (NAFP) also called for lessons to be learned from the implementation of RAAs in any rollout of RCCs.

However, it voiced support, in principle, for the change.

“Every local authority operates in different ways, even within regional consortia, and this over-complicates commissioning and introduces bureaucracy,” said NAFP. “[Choosing] from a wider range of placement options, with better matching, will contribute to better outcomes for children. We welcome the opportunity to be a part of establishing objectives and evaluation for the RCC pilots.”

Pledge to work with sector on implementation

The DfE appears to have recognised that the RCC idea is not universally loved, and is aiming to take the sector with it as it takes it forward.

It said it recognised “the wide variety of views on how RCCs could operate, including those of local authorities, placement providers, foster carers and social workers”. The department pledged to work with the sector to understand how RCCs should work and how they fit into wider plans to deliver sustainable and safe places to live for children in care”.

Contributions are coming in already, for example, from the National Centre for Excellence in Residential Child Care, which last week produced a proposed service specification for RCCs.

The DfE will be accepting responses to its consultation on the proposals until 11 May 2023. You can contribute here.