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.

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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.

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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.

The number of mainstream foster care households in England has fallen by 10% over the past three years, despite a rising care population, official figures have shown.

As of 31 March 2024, there were 33,745 approved non-kinship foster households, down by 1,260 (3.6%) on the year before and by 3,580 (9.6%) since 2021, revealed the Ofsted data.

Though the number of family and friends carer households grew for a second consecutive year in 2023-24, from 8,400 to 8,865, they are approved to care for specific children only.

Also, the growth in their number has been far exceeded by the decline in the number of mainstream households, meaning total fostering capacity has fallen from 45,370 to 42,615 from 2021-24, a drop of 6.1% (2,755).

Falling numbers of fostering places

The fall in the number of mainstream fostering households translated into a drop in the number of approved fostering places in 2023-24, from 72,770 to 70,465. This figure has fallen year on year since 2020, when it stood at 78,830.

Meanwhile, the number of filled approved mainstream places, which was stable from 2021-23, fell in 2023-24, from 44,580 to 42,870.

This is despite the number of children in care in England having grown by 3,070, to 83,840, from 2021-23, a period during which the children’s home sector has grown significantly.

Sector charity the Fostering Network said the declining number of carers was the result of a lack of remuneration, inadequate support from their council or fostering agency and insufficient respect for their role.

In response, the Department for Education (DfE) pointed to increased investment since 2023 in foster care recruitment through the rollout of regional hubs to support applicants through the process, which will be extended to the whole country in 2025-26.

Councils disproportionately hit by fall in carer numbers

As in 2022-23, the fall in the number of mainstream fostering households in 2023-24 was driven by reductions in the numbers approved by local authorities, which fell by 975 (4.9%), from 19,835 to 18,860.

There was a smaller fall in the number approved by independent fostering agencies (IFAs), which dropped by 280 (1.8%), to 14,890. IFAs now account for 44% of mainstream fostering households – up from 41% in 2020 – and 48% of filled mainstream places, up from 43% in 2020.

However, while the number of IFA-approved households grew in 2019-20 and 2020-21, this figure has reduced in each of the last three years.

Recruitment and retention

There was a slight increase in the number of applications to foster in 2023-24, with 8,485 households doing so, up from 8,010 the previous year.

However, the number of newly approved mainstream households was flat year on year (4,055, compared with 4,080 in 2022-23) and below annual levels seen between 2019-20 and 2021-22.

The number of deregistrations was 4,820 in 2023-24, with 4,280 households leaving fostering altogether during the year, down from 4,570 in 2022-23.

Policy response to foster care shortages

Under its Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy, the previous Conservative government took action to bolster foster care recruitment and retention, including by:

• Increasing national minimum fostering allowances by 12.43% in 2023 and 6.88% in 2024.
• Investing £36m, from 2023-25, in 10 regional fostering recruitment hubs, covering 64% of local authorities. These are designed to provide a single point of contact for people interested in fostering and support them through the process from initial enquiry to application.

The majority of hubs were launched in summer 2024, after the timeframe of Ofsted’s figures, meaning their impact is yet to be seen in the data. Labour has continued with the regional hubs policy, allocating £15m in 2025-26 to roll them out to the rest of the country.

Recruitment hubs ‘will generate hundreds of new placements’

A Department for Education spokesperson said this would “generate hundreds of new foster placements and offer children a stable environment to grow up in”.

“Foster carers play a hugely important role in the wider children’s social care system and will be at the heart of our thinking as we re-focus the system to provide earlier support and greater stability for children,” the spokesperson added.

The Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) said it welcomed the extra investment but stressed that it was “imperative that local and central government continue to work together to ensure we have enough foster carers and that they have the resources, training, and support needed to thrive in their roles”.

Leaving IFAs out of recruitment hubs ‘a strategic error’

The Nationwide Association of Fostering Providers, which represents IFAs, meanwhile, raised concerns about the exclusion of agencies from recruitment hubs.

“Government has decided to roll out the recruitment and retention hubs across England,” said NAFP chief executive Harvey Gallagher.

“This is premature, given the short time most have been operational. But, in the light of falling fostering capacity, it’s understandable that government hope these hubs will provide a possible solution.

“The hubs have excluded IFAs – this is a strategic error. Local authorities and IFAs are two parts of the same system, as this dataset demonstrates. Government policy should reflect this.

“We need to rid ourselves of historical divides and pull together to provide the high quality integrated fostering provision which our children and young people deserve.”

Lack of remuneration and support causing carers to quit – charity

The Fostering Network said carers were leaving for three main reasons – inadequate remuneration, lack of support from their fostering service and insufficient respect for their role – and warned that “annual losses will continue unless urgent action on a much greater scale is taken”.

“Action needs to be taken to make fostering more sustainable – we urgently need a UK-wide fostering strategy that addresses the retention of foster carers as much as recruitment,” added chief executive Sarah Thomas.

“We are also calling for a national recruitment campaign that is underpinned by a more personal and child centered approach when a foster carer picks up the phone to enquire about fostering.”

Carers ‘are ignored and blamed’

The National Union of Professional Foster Carers, which represents about 8% of carers, said falling numbers were down to carers’ voices being “ignored” and them being “blamed whenever anything goes wrong”.

General secretary Robin Findlay said regional fostering recruitment hubs would not work when “current carers were leaving and advising prospective carers not to join”.

“Personal recommendation is the best way to recruit new carers but until the system is fixed and current carers treated fairly this will not happen,” he said.

Findlay said the union had put forward ideas to the DfE about changing the way allegations of harm or concerns about standards of care in relation to foster carers were handled.

He claimed that, currently, “fabrications take precedence over facts and evidence and the foster carers are often not invited to contribute to the fact finding until the matter has been self-investigated and decisions have already been made”.

Under the union’s proposed solution, providers and carers would both supply evidence to a legally-qualified external adjudicator, who would determine the outcome.

Allegation statistics

The number of abuse allegations made against foster carers in 2023-24 – 3,050 – was similar to levels seen in the previous two years, though above the numbers recorded in 2019-20 (2,495) and 2020-21 (2,600), showed the Ofsted figures.

Most of the allegations were made by foster children (1,880), with just over half concerning physical abuse (1,610) and almost a quarter (735) emotional abuse.

In about half of cases (1,595), the concern was resolved with no further action taken, while in 875 instances (28.7%), the concern remained and the issue was referred to the fostering panel. In the remainder (575), a period of continued monitoring was agreed.

Further delay to the reform of children’s social care will prolong the “crisis” the sector is in and increase costs, charities have warned in response to the Budget.

The Children’s Charities Coalition issued the message after the government indicated that “fundamental reform” of the sector would be implemented from April 2026 at the earliest, in its Budget document, published yesterday.

In the meantime, ministers have allocated over £250m for 2025-26 to “test innovative measures to support children and reduce costs for local authorities”, including allowances for kinship carers and the rollout of regional hubs to support foster care recruitment.

Testing ideas for reform

This is in addition to the £200m that was allocated by the previous Conservative government from 2023-25 to test measures from last year’s Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy, including the regional commissioning of care placements, setting up specialist child protection teams and establishing family help services.

The latter involve the merger of existing child in need and targeted early help teams and are designed to provide struggling families with earlier, less stigmatising support to help them resolve problems and keep their children.

They were the centrepiece of the 2022 final report of now Labour MP Josh MacAlister’s Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, which proposed investing £2bn in family help over four years, part of a £2.6bn package for the sector as a whole.

Care review lead Josh MacAlister

Investing in earlier help to reduce care population

MacAlister’s thesis was that investment in family help, alongside other reforms, would reverse “a trajectory of rising costs, with more children being looked after and continually poor outcomes for too many children and families”.

As a result, 30,000 fewer children would be in care by 2032-33 than would have been the case without reform, he said.

However, this was dependent on the reforms being implemented from 2023-24. Instead, the previous government responded by testing the measures proposed by MacAlister from 2023-25, leading him to warn that the sector was a “burning platform” and needed more urgent transformation.

‘Social care is in crisis today’

Meanwhile, a report for the Children’s Charities Coalition, which comprises Action for Children, Barnardo’s, the National Children’s Bureau, NSPCC and The Children’s Society, found that the government’s approach would cost the social care system an extra £200m a year over the long run.

The testing phase will now continue for a further year, with the government saying it would set out “plans for fundamental reform of the children’s social care system in phase 2 of the spending review”. This will report next spring, setting public spending plans for 2026 onwards.

“The government has also confirmed its commitment to further reforms to children’s social care in future spending reviews, but children’s social care is in crisis today,” the Children’s Charities Coalition said. “Further delays will see [costs] escalate.”

‘Promoting early intervention and fixing care market’

The government said its reform plan would include “promoting early intervention to help children stay with their families where possible and fixing the broken care market”. Some of its component parts will be included in the forthcoming Children’s Wellbeing Bill, which ministers have said will include measures to tighten regulation of care placements.

The Department for Education is yet to set out details of how the more than £250m for 2025-26 will be spent, beyond allocating £44m to testing financial allowances for kinship carers in up to 10 areas and extending regional fostering recruitment hubs to all council areas.

The latter provide a single point of contact for people interested in fostering and support them through the process from initial enquiry to application, and are designed to boost recruitment.

Further testing of family help and regional commissioning 

The remainder of the more than £250m is likely to include further funding for the families first for children programme, which comprises the family help model and specialist child protection teams and is being tested in 10 areas.

It may also resource the further testing of regional care co-operatives (RCCs), which are trialling the regional commissioning and delivery of care placements in the South East and Greater Manchester.

RCCs 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.

Families need support ‘when challenges are emerging’

Family Rights Group (FRG) chief executive Cathy Ashley welcomed the increased investment in kinship and foster care.

She added: “The spending review and the upcoming Children’s Wellbeing Bill must now prioritise the wider reforms the child welfare system urgently needs.”

“Children and parents need support when challenges are emerging. Family and friends should be given the opportunity to find solutions with a right to a family group conference safely averting children going into care.

“Kinship care needs to be defined in law alongside the practical, emotional and financial support kinship families need. And no child in care or care leaver should be left isolated and alone, with the offer of Lifelong Links [an FRG programme] to build those loving relationships we all need.”

DfE ‘must work at pace on kinship allowances’

The charity Kinship said: “We urge the Department for Education to work at pace to confirm plans for the kinship allowance trial so that kinship carers across England can understand how it might impact them.

“Although the trial will ensure more kinship families get the financial support they need to help children thrive, it must not paralyse progress towards a wider rollout of financial allowances for kinship carers across the country.”

Alongside the reform funding, the Budget also pledged an extra £1.3bn in grant funding for local authorities for 2025-26, at least £600m would be allocated to social care.

Concerns pay and tax rises will swallow up social care funding boost

In total, the government said local authority “spending power” – the maximum resource that councils have available to them – would rise by an estimated 3.2% next year. However, the £600m for social care falls far short of the £3.4bn in additional pressures that the Local Government Association (LGA) has calculated councils will face in adults’ and children’s services in 2025-26, compared with 2024-25.

Also, adult social care leaders have warned that extra funding risks being swallowed up by the costs to providers of rises in the national living wage and employer national insurance contributions.

For the Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS), president Andy Smith said the funding for councils, while welcome, was a “short-term” measure.

“In order to ensure the stability of many vital and valued services, long-term, sustainable funding for local government and children’s services is the only solution,” he added.

Smith urged ministers to set out “sufficient multi-year settlements for local authorities so they can effectively plan for the future”.

The government is committed to introducing multi-year funding settlements, alongside reforms to how resources for councils are allocated, from 2026-27 onwards.

The government has provided £44m for kinship and foster care in its Autumn Budget, part of a package of over £250m to support children’s social care reform.

The funding, for 2025-26, will enable up to 10 areas to test providing kinship carers with allowances to cover some of the costs of care, encouraging more family members or friends to come forward.

It will also lead to the extension of regional fostering recruitment hubs to all council areas, to help them recruit more carers.

Proposal ‘to generate hundreds of placements’

The Department for Education (DfE) said this would “generate hundreds of new foster placements, reduce local authorities’ reliance on the expensive residential care market and offer children a stable environment to grow up in”.

In the Budget, delivered on 30 October 2024, the Treasury said the £44m was part of an investment of over £250m in testing new ways of working in children’s social care next year.

Both policies show clear continuity with the approach taken by the Conservatives.

Testing allowances for kinship carers

In its kinship strategy, published in December 2023, the Tories pledged to pilot providing special guardians of former looked-after children with allowances equivalent to those received by foster carers in eight areas from 2024-28, backed by £16m in 2024-25.

Currently, only family and friends foster carers, among kinship carers, are entitled to an allowance, with special guardians or carers with a child arrangements order generally paid less, or nothing, by local authorities to look after children formerly in care.

The policy was not introduced before July’s general election and, since being elected, Labour has made no statement on it until now.

In response to the Budget announcement, the chief executive of the charity Kinship, Lucy Peake, said: “We are pleased that the government has made a commitment to trialling a new kinship allowance so that more children can be raised in well-supported kinship care with family and friends who love them, delivering better outcomes for children and for the public purse than the care system.”

Allowances ‘help promote stability and durability’ of kinship care arrangements

The Family Rights Group also welcomed the news, while social care evidence body Foundations pointed to evidence about the effectiveness of financial subsidies to kinship carers in promoting permanence.

A review of the evidence around kinship care, commissioned by Foundations, found a small but statistically significant impact on permanence from providing financial subsidies to kinship carers who take on guardianship for children, based on five papers across three US studies.

Its chief executive, Jo Casebourne, said: “Foundations welcomes the government’s support for the trialling of kinship care allowances in pilot local authorities. Our research shows that financial allowances for kinship carers increase the stability and durability of kinship arrangements.

“They make it more likely that families stay together safely, which could help children here avoid residential care and promote better outcomes for them.”

Promoting foster care recruitment

Regional fostering recruitment hubs were introduced as part of the Conservatives’ 2023 Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy, to provide a single point of contact for people interested in fostering and support them through the process from initial enquiry to application.

The Tories provided £36m from 2023-25 to fund these and other initiatives in order to recruit 9,000 more foster carers and redress a 6% drop in the number of mainstream fostering households from 2021-23.

As of September this year, the hubs covered 64% of the country, and the DfE said they would now be extended to all local authority areas.

Over £250m for children’s social care reform

The government has not stipulated how the remainder of the more than £250m for children’s social care reform, announced in the Budget, will be spent.

However, it is likely to include the continuation of some of the initiatives currently being tested as part of the previous government’s Stable Homes agenda. These include:

• The families first for children pathfinder, which is testing, in 10 local areas, the development of family help services, merging child in need and targeted early help provision, and specialist child protection teams.
• The regional care co-operatives pathfinder, which is trialling, in two regions, central regional bodies commissioning and providing care placements for looked-after children on behalf of their constituent local authorities.
• The family network pilot, which is testing providing extended families with funding to help children stay within the family network rather than go into care.

The government will announce further reforms to children’s social care when it delivers its spending review next spring. The review will set detailed plans for public spending from 2026 to 2030.

The Labour government has given its explicit backing to the family help model initiated by its Conservative predecessor to promote earlier intervention for families in need.

Children’s minister Janet Daby said the model, currently being tested in 10 areas, was “central” to its plans for reforming children’s social care, in response to a written parliamentary question from fellow Labour MP Gareth Snell.

The approach involves providing 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 moving cases between targeted early help and child in need, which are merged under the model.

Key proposal from care review and Stable Homes strategy

It was the central proposal from the 2021-22 Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, which called for £2bn to be invested in family help over four years, to rebalance the system away from child protection and reduce the numbers going into care.

It was then taken up by the Conservatives’ 2023 Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy, which set aside just under £40m over two years to test the model – and related initiatives – through the families first for children pathfinder, which is now operating in 10 areas.

Labour did not reference family help or promoting earlier intervention with children in either its manifesto for July’s general election or in the subsequent King’s Speech, in which it announced that a forthcoming Children’s Wellbeing Bill would strengthen multi-agency safeguarding arrangements.

Last month, Department for Education minister Jacqui Smith told the House of Lords that the government shared the care review’s objective of bringing “timely support to children and families” and that it would “build on” the families first for children pathfinder in doing so, without setting out how.

Labour gives explicit backing to family help

However, in her response to Snell, issued last week, Daby explicitly confirmed the government’s support for pathfinder programme and for family help as a cornerstone of its approach to children’s social care reform.

“We recognise that there is a strong evidence base for early intervention and whole family working to support families with multiple issues before they reach crisis point, to stay together and thrive,” said Daby.

In an echo of the Stable Homes strategy, she added: “This is at the heart of our reform agenda to rebalance the children’s social care system toward earlier intervention, which is aimed at improving families’ lives today, their outcomes in the future, and reducing costs to public services.”

“Central to this ambition is testing a new model of family help which builds on best practice from well-evidenced programmes such as Supporting Families and Pause, which feature whole-family working and lead practitioners providing dedicated support to prevent re-referrals.”

Supporting Families – previously the Troubled Families programme – involves allocating key workers to provide early and co-ordinated support for families with multiple needs to help improve outcomes and reduce costs to the state, while Pause is a support scheme for women at risk of having more than one child removed.

‘Supporting families at the earliest opportunity’

Daby said the families first for children pathfinders were “providing targeted support to help families overcome challenges at the earliest opportunity”, while also “involving [family networks] in decision-making at an earlier stage”.

The pathfinder also involves authorities establishing expert multi-agency child protection teams, with cases led by specialist social workers known as lead child protection practitioners.

The minister – a former fostering social worker – added that early findings from an independent evaluation of the pathfinder were due in spring 2025.

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Rules curbing councils’ use of agency social workers in children’s services will start coming into force next month, the Department for Education (DfE) has announced.

Under the policy, English authorities will be expected to agree regional pay caps on locums’ hourly rates, refrain from hiring early career practitioners, or staff who have recently left permanent roles in the same region, as agency workers and ensure they directly manage all staff hired through so-called project teams.

The DfE said the rules – part of the previous government’s Stable Homes, Built on Love children’s social care reforms – were designed “to reduce the overreliance on and costs of agency child and family social workers” to authorities, saving them money and improving continuity of support for children.

The proportion of agency staff in the children’s services workforce rose sharply between 2021 and 2023, from 15.5% to 17.8% of full-time equivalent (FTE) positions.

During the same period, the Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) issued repeated warnings that agencies had started engaging in “profiteering” in the face of councils’ increasing recruitment struggles, including by limiting the supply of locums to so-called project teams, driving up cost.

The ADCS welcomed the introduction of the rules, however, agency body the Recruitment and Confederation (REC) said it remained concerned that they may exacerbate social work’s recruitment and retention problems.

How the policy has changed

The proposed rules have undergone multiple changes since being proposed in February 2023.

Notably, the DfE dropped initial proposals to tie locum pay to that of practitioners in equivalent permanent roles, in favour of regionally agreed price caps.

It also ditched a proposed ban on the use of project teams, allowing authorities to continue using them so long as they retained management control over them and were able to approve the hiring of each practitioner.

The ADCS criticised the latter decision as blunting the rules’ potential to support continuity of support for children and tackle the practice of agencies restricting the supply of agency staff to teams, rather than individual locums.

The DfE subsequently confirmed that councils would be able to breach regional price caps, though would need to report all such breaches to the department.

Changes to price cap plans

Following consultation on the statutory guidance, at the start of 2024, the DfE has made further changes to the plans.

While price caps were previously designed to cover the total cost to councils of hiring an agency worker, including agency and managed service provider (MSP) fees, they will now just cover the locum’s hourly pay, including employers’ national insurance contributions and holiday pay.

This was primarily in response to concerns about councils having to share details with regional partners about agency and MSP fees, which are commercially sensitive.

More clarity on notice periods and implementation date

On notice periods, some respondents criticised the DfE’s proposal to simply align these with those for permanent staff in similar roles, on the grounds that this would remove the flexibility that was integral to agency work.

In response, the department has introduced a standard four-week notice period for locums, with shorter periods used where these aligned with arrangements for equivalent permanent staff.

Also, the DfE has introduced a cut-off date – 1 October 2025 – for councils to bring all their contractual arrangements into line with the rules, having previously said this should happen “as soon as reasonably possible”.

This was in response to calls for greater clarity and to improve compliance with the rules.

No ban on project teams but DfE will review approach

While the DfE rejected calls from the ADCS and the British Association of Social Workers (BASW) for the rules to prohibit the use of project teams, it said it remained open to tightening its proposed arrangements.

“We will review the efficacy of this approach and remain open to further restrictions on local authority use of project teams or other
packaged models to ensure every model of resourcing social workers supports the best interests of children and families.”

Directors welcome rules in face of ‘high costs’ of agency workforce

The ADCS welcomed the pledge to review project team rules.

Vice president Rachael Wardell said: “ADCS is clear social work is not a short-term project, at the heart of good social work with children and families is building long lasting relationships in order to empower those we work with to make positive, sustained changes in their lives.”

More broadly, she said the agency rules would “allow us to better support the children and families that we work with while maintaining a sufficiently flexible agency workforce”.

“Recruiting and retaining a permanent stable social work workforce is an increasing challenge for local authorities as is our overreliance on agency workers and the high costs associated with agency use,” she added

“Children and families tell us they benefit from having a consistent worker who builds a strong meaningful relationship with them, yet the short-term nature of agency social work and the level of turnover, including churn amongst agency workers, makes this more difficult to achieve.”

Agency sector concerns

For agency sector body the REC, deputy chief executive Kate Shoesmith welcomed the fact that the government had recognised the “important role agency workers, interims and locums play in children and family services”, driven by “growing demand on social services, increasing pressure on social workers and a strong desire for flexible working are key drivers”.

She also acknowledged “encouraging” changes made since the policy was first proposed last year, including allowing councils to breach agency pay caps.

However, she added: “It is going to be vitally important that each measure is fully evaluated so the proposals set out today do not exacerbate the significant recruitment and retention crisis in the UK social care sector.”

The rules do not apply to local authority adults’ services or any other sector of social work employment in England.

The government has vowed to continue with work initiated by its predecessor to tackle workloads among local authority children’s social workers.

The Labour administration has also indicated it will continue reforms started by the Conservatives to improve early help for families and boost the recruitment of foster carers.

In the House of Lords this week, education minister Baroness (Jacqui) Smith said the government would “continue the work of the national workload action group” (NWAG), and that it would report by January 2025 on how to reduce burdens on practitioners.

Workload action group

The NWAG is a group of sector leaders, established by the last government, to “consider drivers of unnecessary workload and to develop solutions so that social workers have enough time to spend working directly with children and families”.

The initiative came out of the Conservatives’ Stable Homes, Built on Love children’s social care reform agenda and was based on a recommendation from the 2021-22 Independent Review of Children’s Social Care (the “care review”).

It appointed a consortium led by Research in Practice, including Essex County Council and King’s College London, to support the NWAG up to March 2025,while also developing resources to help councils improve retention and make better use of agency staff.

Plans to tackle managerialism and caseloads

In spring this year, the consortium selected 22 councils to help develop and test resources designed to cut workloads, based on a shortlist of priority actions selected by the DfE from a wider menu produced by Research in Practice.

Brief published minutes from a NWAG meeting on 20 May 2024 said the priority actions related to managerialism and administration, supervision, workload and caseload management, case recording and hybrid working.

Baroness Jacqui Smith (photo from Department for Education)

Smith gave her pledge to continue the NWAG’s work in response to a question from Baroness (Diana) Barran – a Conservative DfE minister from 2022-24 – about the negative impact of social worker turnover on children in care.

In response, Smith linked tackling working conditions to enhancing workforce stability, pointing to both the NWAG and the separate work by the consortium to develop resources to boost social work retention, which she said would be published this autumn.

Use of agency staff ‘worrying’

The minister also described councils’ use of agency staff as “worrying”, in the context of 17.8% of full-time equivalent council children’s social workers in England being locums as of September 2023.

“There are many good and high-quality social workers who come through the agency route, but their position is more likely to be unstable than it would be with a permanent worker,” she said.

“That is why the department is already building a new relationship with the children’s social care workforce and is looking at how to improve support for workers in children’s social care.”

Agency social work rules

While referencing the NWAG and associated work, she did not refer to the agency social work rules drawn up by its Conservative predecessor, another element of Stable Homes based on a recommendation from the care review.

However, on 12 September 2024, the government confirmed that it would implement the rules.

These will require councils to set regional caps on how much they pay agencies to employ locums, not hire agency practitioners who do not have three years’ permanent experience and maintain direct management of all social workers engaged via agency project teams.

The rules will come into force in three stages. Most will be implemented from 31 October 2024, with councils then required to submit data on their use of agency staff from the start of 2025 and then the price caps coming into force in spring next year.

Speaking in July this year, just after Labour came to power, the Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) president, Andy Smith, said he expected the statutory guidance governing the rules to come into force in September.

Falling use of locums in anticipation of rules

He told Community Care at the time that the anticipation of the rules was leading councils to work together to reduce use of agency staff.

Meanwhile, four regions – the East of England, East Midlands, London and the South East – have announced a plan to develop a common agreement for their use of locums that is designed to tie in with the national rules.

Baroness Smith did set out other elements of the Stable Homes agenda that Labour would persist.

Fostering policies to continue

She said it would continue the policy of regional fostering recruitment hubs, which provide a single point of contact for people interested in fostering and support them through the process from initial enquiry to application.

Smith said the hubs covered 64% of the country, while councils not involved would be able to continue using Fosterlink, a DfE-funded support service to help them improve foster care recruitment practices.

The Conservatives provided £36m from 2023-25 to fund these and other initiatives in order to recruit 9,000 more foster carers and redress a 6% drop in the number of mainstream fostering households from 2021-23.

Labour to ‘build on’ family help work

Baroness Smith also said that the government would “build on” the work of the 10 families first for children pathfinders to respond earlier to the issues families face. The pathfinders are testing a new model of children’s services proposed by Stable Homes and recommended by the care review, which comprises:

• Multidisciplinary family help services, merging pre-existing targeted early help and child in need provision, to provide earlier support to families to help them overcome challenges and stay together.
• Expert-led multi-agency child protection teams, including specialist social workers, known as lead child protection practitioners, to improve the response of children at risk of significant harm.
• Greater use of family networks when families need support, involving the wider family in decision-making at an earlier stage and providing support packages to help them keep children safe and well at home.
• Strengthened multi-agency safeguarding arrangements, including an increased role for education.

Prior to Smith’s comments, Labour has been relatively quiet on how far it will follow the Stable Homes, Built on Love agenda.

Children’s Wellbeing Bill 

Instead, it has promoted the forthcoming Children’s Wellbeing Bill – announced in the King’s Speech – as its key vehicle for transforming children’s social care.

Janet Daby (credit: Richard Townsend Photography)

As set out in the King’s Speech, this is designed to strengthen multi-agency child protection arrangements while, earlier this month, children’s minister Janet Daby said it would also seek to tackle “profiteering” among providers of placements for children in care.

Smith repeated this point in the House of Lords this week.

“Local authorities are currently providing 45% of looked-after children’s placements and the private sector is providing 40%, some of which offer stability, high-quality and loving care for our children,” she said.

“However, where it is clear that placement providers are profiteering from the most vulnerable children in the country, this Government are absolutely committed to taking action.”

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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”.

Councils’ response to child neglect is “slow and inadequate” due to high thresholds for intervention and a lack of services, the NSPCC has found.

A third of social workers polled by the charity said they had faced pressure from managers or colleagues to cease or delay intervention in neglect cases, while professionals in partner agencies criticised how children’s social care responded to the issue.

Neglect is defined by the government as “the persistent failure to meet a child’s basic physical and/or psychological needs, [which is] likely to result in the serious impairment of the child’s health or development” (source: Working Together to Safeguard Children).

Call for national strategy to tackle ‘normalisation’ of neglect

In a report published last week, the NSPCC warned that a ‘normalisation’ of neglect, amid high rates of poverty and long-term cuts to preventive services, was resulting in children being left for too long in harmful situations.

However, it said that neither the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care (the “care review”), which reported in 2022, and the previous government’s response to it, the Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy, addressed the issue adequately.

The charity, which polled 100 social workers and 600 teachers, police officers and healthcare professionals for its report, urged the government to develop a national neglect strategy and improved guidance for practitioners on tackling the issue, tied to ministers’ plans to tackle child poverty.

Most common category of abuse

Neglect is the most common initial category of abuse recorded in child protection plans in England, accounting for just under half (49.3%) of cases as of March 2023.

Recorded levels of neglect have remained consistent since 2019, as have the numbers of emotional abuse cases, during which time levels of recorded physical abuse, sexual abuse and multiple abuse have fallen.

The NSPCC found that 82% of social workers – and 54% of all professionals surveyed – had seen an increase in the level of neglect during their professional lifetimes. Of those who had seen an increase, 90% said this had been driven by increases in the cost of living and poverty, with 76% citing cuts in community support to parents.

The latter reflects the 44% fall in council spending on early intervention services from 2010-11 to 2022-23 identified in analysis for the NSPCC and fellow children’s charities (source: Larkham, J, 2024).

However, practitioners who took part in online focus groups for the NSPCC’s study, told the charity that neglect often did not meet the threshold for intervention.

Social workers ‘encouraged to delay action’ on neglect 

A third of social workers surveyed said they had been encouraged by a colleague or a manager to delay or cease action on a neglect, compared with 21% who had experienced this in relation to other forms of maltreatment.

Reflecting this, 52% of teachers polled said children’s social care usually responded slowly to neglect cases.

The NSPCC linked this to the child protection system being “heavily skewed” to identifying individual incidents that meet the threshold of a child suffering, or being likely to suffer, significant harm.

“Unlike other forms of abuse, neglect rarely manifests as a crisis requiring immediate action,” the report said. “This makes it challenging to identify as practitioners must consider the severity, frequency, developmental timing and duration of neglectful behaviour, to address whether it reaches the threshold for intervention.”

Lack of services to tackle neglect

Even where neglect was identified, practitioners reported that there was a lack of services to support families.

Only 19% of police officers said they thought appropriate action was taken to give the child and family the necessary support to address neglect and 21% said this support was never given. More broadly, 83% of all professionals surveyed said there were not enough services in their areas to provide targeted support to children and families in these cases.

Education and health professionals pointed to a lack of resource and expertise to address neglect in early help services, with teachers in particular highlighting the challenge of families accessing services based on parental consent.

Meanwhile, social workers also highlighted the lack of specialist interventions for children affected by neglect, contrary to practice in relation to child exploitation.

Social care reform strategy ‘does not address neglect’

The NSPCC said the previous government had not adequately addressed neglect through its Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy.

That document made just four references to neglect – all in the context of child maltreatment more generally – though it dealt with specific forms of abuse and exploitation similarly.

It said that the strategy’s flagship reform – to create multi-disciplinary family help teams, merged from targeted early help and child in need services, to improve the timeliness and effectiveness of family support – could “transform the response to neglect”.

The charity said that the new Labour government should make sure that pathfinder local authorities develop an early response to neglect as part of their testing of the family help reform.

This should focus on engaging with and nurturing families where neglect is present in order to encourage them to engage and accept help.

Call for neglect strategy

More broadly, the NSPCC called on the government to develop a national neglect strategy, in order to share the latest best practice, learning and evidence about neglect, its links to poverty, its impact over time and what works in tackling it, both through universal and specialist services, and to improve training for relevant practitioners.

Alongside this, the government should examine the case for amending the definition of neglect in Working Together to Safeguard Children (see above), including potentially removing the reference to the harm being “persistent”.

“No child should be left to experience maltreatment until it is deemed to be ‘persistent’ enough for intervention,” the charity said. “The opportunity to intervene early is then missed, with devastating consequences for the child, and a need for more costly late-stage
intervention.”

The NSPCC pointed out that definitions of neglect in Wales and Northern Ireland did not reference persistence. It added in Scotland, the definition, while referencing persistence stresses that single instances of neglect can cause significant harm.

Agency social workers numbers are coming down in children’s services in England following significant increases in their use by councils in recent years, a sector leader has said.

Association of Directors of Children’s Services president Andy Smith told Community Care he believed the trend was the result of the planned introduction of rules later this year to curb councils’ use of locums.

Rules on locum social work

The rules are part of the previous government’s Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy to reform children’s social care and are designed to cut the costs of agency work while improving continuity of support for children and families.

They include a ban on anyone without three years’ experience in a permanent role in children’s services from taking up a locum role, a requirement for councils to agree regional price caps on what they pay agencies and a restriction on the use of agency project teams.

Agency social worker numbers have escalated in recent years on the back of councils’ increasing struggles to recruit and retain social workers in children’s services.

As of September 2023, locums represented 17.8% of the children’s social work workforce in English councils, up from 15.5% in 2021.

‘Numbers of agency workers falling’

However, Smith said there was evidence that this trend was reversing.

“There’s certainly data showing that the numbers of agency social workers are going in the right direction, are reducing,” said Smith, who is strategic director of people services at Derby council.

“Certainly, in my local area, in the East Midlands, we’re seeing that across all 10 local authorities. So our hypothesis is that the impact of the reforms that are clearly going to come into effect as we move into the autumn are starting to potentially have an effect in the right direction.”

Under plans set by the previous government, statutory guidance requiring councils to follow most of the rules would come into force this summer, with requirements relating to the price caps and data collection being implemented in the autumn.

While the new Labour government has not yet commented on publicly on the plans, Smith said he expected the statutory guidance to come into force in September, in a speech to last week’s ADCS conference.

Disappointment over project team reversal

The ADCS has campaigned strongly for curbs on the agency social work market since 2021 and Smith said the DfE’s proposals were “writ large” with the association’s ideas.

However, he added that it remained disappointed by the previous government’s decision to reverse its initial plan to completely ban the use of project teams.

These involve councils hiring agency workers en masse, often with their own management and restrictions on caseloads.

ADCS has long warned that agencies have increasingly restricted the supply of locums to project teams, preventing councils from engaging individual workers to fill gaps and charging them more per practitioner.

The number of social workers hired through teams rose fivefold from January to June 2021 to the same period in 2022, according to ADCS research.

‘Opportunity’ with new government to reinstate ban

However, the department dropped the idea of a complete ban, after some respondents to the initial consultation on the rules said there using them was appropriate where caseloads, staff absences or vacancies were high, or to support struggling authorities.

Smith said ADCS was disappointed by this “U-turn”, but added that having a new government presented the opportunity to reinstate the planned ban.

“In the first conversation I have with the minister who will have the children’s social care brief that is on the list to talk to her about,” he said.

“They could do that tomorrow. That could be done really easily and it would send out, I think, a really strong message to the sector that government is listening and it sees the value of relationships and relational social work. Social work is not a project.”

Children’s social care reform plans

In his speech to the ADCS conference, Smith also stressed the urgency of implementing the sector reforms proposed by the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care and taken forward in Stable Homes, Built on Love.

Besides the agency social work rules, these are designed to ensure that many more children are supported to stay with their families or, where this not possible, with kinship carers; that those at risk are much better protected than is currently the case, and that children who go into care receive a much better experience and, as a result, better life chances than now.

The care review projected that the reforms would cost £2.6bn over four years but would save money in the long-term by reducing the projected care population by 30,000 – roughly 30% – within 10 years.

So far, the DfE has committed £200m to testing the proposed changes, for example, through the 10 “pathfinder” areas trialling the deployment of family help teams, merging child in need and targeted early help services, and specialist child protection practitioners.

Reform cost now ‘more than £2.6bn proposed by care review’

“We simply can’t afford to derail the plans or indeed take our foot of the gas; both in terms of children’s outcomes and the finances that we are diligently trying to balance day in, day out,” said Smith in his speech.

“The longer we leave it, the more it will cost; we need to reset the system now.”

Smith told Community Care that what was required now was more than £2.6bn because of increases in service costs since the care review’s final report in May 2022.

He said he had raised the issue with new education secretary Bridget Phillipson in an initial call with her last week.

Smith also called on the government to widen the focus of children’s social care reform beyond councils to their key partners.

“We can’t realise the ambition around any reforms, and really improve outcomes for children, if it’s just seen as a local authority endeavour, he said. “It has to engage health, it has to engage the police, both strategically and on the ground, and that was really missing in the run-up to the general election.”

‘Really difficult choices’ needed on funding services

During the election, Labour made no funding commitments in relation to children’s social care, despite the Local Government Association saying councils would need an extra £5bn in 2026-27 compared with 2023-24 to maintain provision at existing levels.

At the same time, the incoming government has pledged not to raise income tax rates, national insurance, VAT or corporation tax and set itself tight fiscal rules limiting how much it can borrow to fund public spending.

Funding for councils from 2025 onwards is due to be set out in a spending review this autumn and Smith stressed that “really difficult choices” would have to be made, though this could include using existing resource in a different way.

Call to pool budgets for children with mental health

For example, he suggested pooling NHS and local authority resources to support children with significant mental health needs in an arrangement similar to the better care fund (BCF) in adults’ services.

The BCF pools local authority and NHS funding locally to help people live independently at home for longer and enable them to receive care in the most appropriate place, for example, by tackling delayed discharges from hospital. It has enabled what would previously have been NHS resource to be spent on adult social care services.

Councils have struggled significantly with finding appropriate placements for children in care with severe mental health needs. This has led to them to seeking high numbers of so-called deprivation of liberty (DoL) orders from the High Court to authorise very restrictive care arrangements, often in unregistered settings.

At the same time, some council heads have criticised the NHS for reducing support for these young people through child and adolescent mental health services.

Smith said a BCF-style arrangement could help lever investment into preventive services to avoid councils having to source expensive and restrictive placements through DoL orders.