Uncorrected oral evidence: Children’s social care
Oral evidence, 28 October 2026.
The Chair
I formally welcome you and ask you each to introduce yourselves to the committee and give your perspective on where we are up to in legislative finance and supply and demand within the care system. We will then go into formal questions.
Rachael Wardell
Good morning, everyone. I am the executive director for children, families and lifelong learning at Surrey County Council. I am here today representing the Association of Directors of Children’s Services and speaking on behalf of the sector. The few words that I would say about the current position of reforms is that—as you know—there is a huge package of reforms going through children’s services at the moment including the Families First Partnership programme, which is a really important focus on children’s social care, Best Start in Life and the package of SEND reforms. The Families First reforms need to be fully implemented by the end of March so that process is under way at the moment. We are anticipating that this will have an impact on the care sector, both in terms of the number of children who come into care and potentially the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 and the way that care is provided to those young people. At the moment there is a real challenge in the sector and I hope we can explore that in this committee today.
Lucy Butler
I am really pleased to be here today. I am the chief executive of Home and Future, which is the South East Regional Care Cooperative. There are 19 local authorities in the region of the south-east. We have 15 signed up to the regional care co-operative and are working with 18 to implement the fostering reforms. Regarding where we are in terms of the reforms I can speak particularly to sufficiency and the work around that; probably less so on the wider things. I was previously a director in the south-east in two authorities so I have that background from a director’s perspective. I would like to give two caveats about regional care co-operatives. First, we—the south-east—were one of the pathfinders with Greater Manchester. We are very new and are dealing with an issue that has been around for 30 to 40 years so it is not a quick fix. Secondly, you have just heard me say that we have 15 of the 19 local authorities signed up with us. We are not mandatory; it is a choice whether or not local authorities join us but obviously we will be more powerful together.
Gerald Vernon-Jackson
I am deputy chair of the Children, Young People and Families Committee at the LGA. I was a social worker a long time ago and worked in both residential and fieldwork. I then ran Portsmouth City Council for 15 years so I have both those bits of experience. I want to highlight the financial pressure, which inevitably always happens and people know about, but we are having to put in about £1 billion a year across local authorities into children’s social care and that is not funded centrally. I was with a council earlier this week. Based on its savings target that it has to hit this year, it needs to find over £100 million in cuts. I also want to highlight that the complexity of kids that we are looking after is growing. More and more young people have complex needs in mental health, substance abuse and exploitation. The number of children we are looking after fell slightly last year but overall it is growing, which is a big problem. We have issues of unregistered homes, which I am sure we will come on to talk about. I am really pleased Lucy is here from the regional care co-operative because councils have withdrawn from providing direct services over the last 25 years. Now we are probably having to go back into re-providing them and we need to think about how that happens. My last point is that there is a real need for better co-ordination particularly with the health service. The number of beds available for children and adolescents with severe mental health problems has fallen enormously. We are the end of the road; the buck stops with us. Increasingly young people are being sent from the criminal justice system, for us to look after and not be locked up in prison, which is probably right for them but it produces an enormous problem for us. In my council we have one kid who we have been looking after costing £25,000 a week. That is not unusual and is becoming more and more common. Those are some things that would be interesting to talk through today.
The Chair
Those were very interesting opening remarks, which we will dig down into through our questioning. I would like you all—Lucy particularly—to contribute around the new care co-operative model that you are developing. You have touched on some aspects of it that you think will be helpful. Could you elaborate a bit more on how it is being rolled out, what the funding arrangements are with local authorities, how it will tackle sufficiency of supply in the system and the issue around boundaries that you are incorporating?
Lucy Butler
There is a lot there so you might have to prompt me if I forget some things. As I said we were one of the two pathfinders nationally along with Greater Manchester. We are very different: Greater Manchester is a combined authority that already had a relationship and was working with those 10 local authorities; in the south-east there was no real history of local authorities working together. Something that we were focused on was how we could best collaborate to get a better deal for children. We have been looking at joint commission arrangements in the region and particularly working with health partners. In the south-east we have five ICBs and two provider collaboratives so it is not a simple picture. We have established a memorandum of understanding with the ICBs and provider collaboratives to work together to get better homes for children so there is a really strong ethos. However, that has not been replicated nationally; we have not seen the jointness there so that is something we are particularly interested in working on. We are working with health and local authority colleagues to look at joint, integrated pathways of support and joint provision for children. We have also been supporting the instruction of end-to-end fostering in the region. As I said, the south-east is a really big region so to do that effectively we have been working sub-regionally; we have been working with five sub-regions. It is really important that we stay close to local authorities and place. We are looking at how we can bring the advantages of working in a more regional way to have better conversations with providers, have a bit more control and say and to do the things that work at a regional level. We would say that local authorities are really good at commissioning services for children but there are some things that you need local authorities to come together to tackle. Those are usually the more difficult issues such as working together with health and really supporting children with more complex needs. That is where the power of regional care co-operatives comes in. We have also been doing a lot of work around workforce, in particular residential workforce. What we are hearing is that they might not have the skills that are needed to support children with multiple needs, so we are looking at how we enhance training and support for residential workers. We are also looking at how we bring the voice of children and young people into the work that we do. We really want to hear from children who have experience of Tier 4 provision and of unregistered provision. We really want to support local authorities to have the right homes for children at the right time. It is really interesting and sufficiency is a complex issue. People often say there are not enough homes for children but it is much more complex than that. I can give you a really simple example: we have 2,220 children who are living outside the south-east region and 1,936 children from outside the south-east who live in the region. That is just one example of how complex sufficiency is. How do we unpick that? One really good thing about regional care co-operatives is that it will be a national initiative. Going back to that statistic I just shared with you, most children from the south-east live in London, and likewise most of the children coming into the south-east are from London, so we are doing a piece of work with London to look at how we might work together. Some issues can be tackled regionally and some need to be tackled nationally. I hope that answers your question and all the things you asked me.
Rachael Wardell
I agree very broadly with everything that Lucy has said about the advantages of regional care co-operatives and the benefit of working at scale and collaborating across boundaries. When Lucy refers to children with the most complex needs, they are quite low in number but are usually the children for whom it is most difficult to find a placement or we might be trying to find a placement in an emergency, because quite often what happens to these children is a form of crisis. That is often what leads to them being located outside their home local authority. Some things that Lucy was describing arise out of the conditions at the point at which a placement decision is made. Once you have successfully found a home for a child in which they are doing well, moving them purely for geographical reasons does not make sense. You want them to stay somewhere where they are looked after and thriving. There are lots of complex moving parts. The thing that we can do very well together as an RCC is commission specialist provision at greater scale than any one local authority would need but that is responsive to those particular needs. We have all referred to mental health as being a big issue. There are no longer the inpatient places that there used to be. Those children are probably better off outside hospital but they need specialist provision that meets their needs and they are often the children that we are the most worried about and who most need stability. They also need to be close to home because their existing networks—maybe their existing education, which I am sure we will come back to later in this session—family members and friends are all important to them. Having a solution that is regional and close is really important. I do not think Lucy would disagree that RCCs are not the answer to everything and we should not try to get them to solve all the challenges. There are lots of things that local authorities already do well and many local authorities now are growing their in-house capacity and capability, which we should encourage. The local connection is vital and, where we can deliver something locally without needing to reach for that scale solution, that seems to be the most sensible and pragmatic way forward. The RCCs offer that additionality for those complex placements.
The Chair
I have two very quick follow-up questions. Are the resources from those 15 local authorities pooled and still kept in separate silos?
Lucy Butler
Yes.
The Chair
Do you not have a lever to pull?
Lucy Butler
No. You might want to ask Rachael this as well but there is something about the confidence in RCCs. We are very new and the statutory duties all sit with the directors of children’s services, as you know, so it is a bit of a leap of faith to give all your commissioning budget. In the south-east it is something like £1.3 billion so it is a huge amount of money. It is not going to happen quickly but we are more of a strategic commissioning body to support the bits that local authorities are struggling to do by themselves. I remember that you asked me originally how we were funded so I will answer that. We have a funding formula and the local authorities fund us completely. In a sense we are like a member organisation working on behalf of our local authorities.
The Chair
Could you remind me what the timetable is for assessment of the pathfinders with the view to rolling it out nationally? You said unless it is done nationally as well then there are still impediments in the revised system you are trying to put in place.
Lucy Butler
There are a further five RCCs that have just been established in the last few months, so they are very new. They are doing the groundwork that we did initially, which is bringing together data, establishing relationships and having conversations with their local authorities about what their priorities are. That does not cover the whole of England; it is 100 out of 150, so two-thirds. There are plans to roll it out further.
Gerald Vernon-Jackson
I used to work in a secure unit in a regionally provided place and, to be blunt, it was horrible: you locked kids in, the only exercise they had was in a yard because of the place it was in, et cetera. Regional care co-operatives are going to be enormously helpful but not quick. I would not expect a huge amount of change within five years because they are going to have to get up and running, so I do not expect things to happen too fast. We need to be absolutely clear about the scale of the problem. If we look at the number of kids we were looking after between 2018 and 2022, when we were spending more than £10,000 a week on a child, it rose from 120 to 1,500 in a four-year period and it has gone up from there. We have had one recently where we spent £25,000 a week looking after the child. The bit that is important is that regional care co-operatives can really help at the high, specialist end of the market. We have to be really careful about saying they are the answer to everything. When you are looking after a kid it is really important to try to make sure that you maintain links with family, school and friends and moving them even 20 miles means that lots of those break down. The longer a kid is away from home, the more chance they will stay in care for a long time. Trying to work to keep those links of school and family going is best done at a local level because we know what the connections are and how we can try to make sure we keep those. Regional care co-operatives are enormously good for the high end of the market; I would not want them to be able to solve the local stuff about ordinary fostering, children’s home places, kinship care and things like that.
Rachael Wardell
It may be that your later questions will explore this further. When we are talking about placements that cost £25,000 a week I would not want to give the impression that we are necessarily getting £25,000 a week of value out of those placements. I would not suggest that those necessarily meet a child’s needs better than lower-cost placements. Obviously for children with complex needs, their placements are likely to be more expensive and intensive and the staff will have specialist skills. We do not see value for money in those placements.
Gerald Vernon-Jackson
If you are a social worker and you have to try to make sure that the kid is safe, that is what you will do. That is the prime motivator, not what it costs. Your choice is maybe zero and that is a real problem.
Baroness Watkins of Tavistock
There are two things that have come to me. First, for a tiny proportion of children you will deliberately send them a long way away because of county lines or whatever. I just wondered what percentage that might be. Secondly, on the £25,000 a week, about 35 years ago I worked in an inpatient child and adolescent unit as a nurse. At today’s value I do not think it would be any more expensive. Do you think health is taking its responsibility seriously in terms of treatment? For some children—given the right treatment at the right time—it might be more costly then but if you look over a five-year period it is cost-effective.
Rachael Wardell
I will take the health question first. Health colleagues take their responsibilities very seriously but they are chronically under-resourced. Children’s health funding takes second seat to adult health funding and within that, mental health funding takes less. They are not able to respond in the way that they would want to. There are areas of conflict. One obvious one is about children’s behavioural issues, which may or may not be driven by a mental health condition. Where something is labelled as behavioural and falls outside the purview of the health service to respond to it, we might have a very strong view that it is actually a mental health condition. We see that kind of conflict for sure.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester
Thank you for the very interesting answers so far; I am sure there will be lots more to come. I want to ask you about the market management measures contained in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026. Do you think it is likely to make any difference to the situation that the DfE reported: that the children’s social care market is fundamentally broken? Will it manage to reshape the market in the way that the Government want?
Gerald Vernon-Jackson
The answer is probably no. I would hope that it would do better but the reality is no, partly because of the huge pressure on placements. Secondly, these are increasingly run by large organisations that are funded by private equity whose demand is for profit, profit, profit and profit and then some more profit. They are big enough to be able to do their accounts in a way that big corporations do. We have a rule in councils that any developer wanting to build that has profits less than 10% does not have to contribute towards social housing. Very few developers declare that they have more than 10% profit and we do not have the resources that they have to go through all their accounts and look at them. It is the right thing to be doing and I welcome the Government’s change of heart from the previous Government to say they are going to look at it, but it is not going to make a huge difference. We are going to need much more power than is being proposed to be able to regulate that market and make a big change. Rachael will know; she has to sign the cheques.
Rachael Wardell
You are right, the answer is probably not currently constructive. There are very welcome measures in the Act but they are proposed as last resorts—for example, the profit cap. Probably as a sector we would like to see profit-making—certainly profiteering—providers, where the profit margins are very high, ruled out of this very important area of work.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester
How are you going to do that?
Rachael Wardell
The only way is going to be through legislation. If the profit cap is used as a first resort rather than last resort—in other words, if we are active in the market straightaway—that becomes really important. If it is left as a last resort we will see continuing movement from organisations seeking to use this market to make high unwarranted profits.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester
Is there not a risk that the clever people who run the accounts of the companies will outwit the government officials?
Rachael Wardell
That is always a risk and the only way that you could do that is by outlawing profit altogether, which is not an option.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester
Is there a future for voluntarily and publicly run services?
Gerald Vernon-Jackson
There has to be. If we get to the position where it is only the private sector there, then they have a monopoly and we can be ripped off even more.
Lucy Butler
We have to be careful with these measures. They are welcome but we have to be careful of adverse consequences and the impact if we suddenly see big swathes of the market disappearing. That is a real concern. What is preventing some providers—the voluntary sector and local authorities—from entering into this area more? We need to be really understanding of that and really support those providers. There are all sorts of issues: it takes a long time to register and set up a home, et cetera; all sorts of things are getting in the way. We need to be as focused on the blockers as we are on what is preventing people from entering this, what is stopping them, and what we can do to support the providers that we want to support our children.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester
Is there not a real danger that the children with the most complex needs will be right at the end of the queue when it comes to future investment and so on?
Rachael Wardell
No because they are currently costing the system so much per individual placement. Really well-invested funds into specialist placements would bring the overall costs down. That is why what we say about the RCCs and other measures is that they should focus on those young people first. From our point of view, if the resources that are currently in the system were redirected into securing and developing specialist placements, that would be a very worthwhile investment and they would be first in the queue for most DCSs.
Lord Barber of Chittlehampton
Can I ask a supplementary? I am just thinking about these profit caps and the difficulty of doing that but I can absolutely see the importance of it. I wonder if there could be pressure on at least some providers to invest more in the skills and professional development of their staff because another issue is that they are making a lot of profits. Even if there is no profit cap they could at least be investing in the quality of the staff they recruit, the way they train and develop them and all that. We need to build a whole ecosystem of qualified, talented, effective people in this field and it is not quite happening at the moment.
Gerald Vernon-Jackson
It would seem that the best ones will do that; the ones who are not so good will not because they are interested in the profit. A great thing about having the regional care co-operatives here is that we are able to make sure that we are investing long-term in highly skilled staff who are well trained and well supported. and it is a really good thing to be doing. Rubbish providers will remain rubbish providers.
Lord Barber of Chittlehampton
If the market were working, they would be exited from the market.
Gerald Vernon-Jackson
The problem is that the market does not work because we are desperate for placements. If you are a social worker and are trying to find somewhere to keep that child safe the money is irrelevant. You will just try to take it and persuade Rachael that she has to write the cheques. We are in a system where there are not enough places and too many children so there is an enormous pressure just to take something to keep a child safe.
Rachael Wardell
One professional development route for practitioners in children’s residential is into social work. Although that is obviously important professional development and to be welcomed because we need social workers, there is a lot to be said for staying in the residential sector. These are often low-paid workers but they are not low-skilled and those skills are not sufficiently valued in the pay scales in their settings. In local authorities that are trying to grow their in-house workforce and provision you can definitely see that investment in workforce. Lucy alluded—in relation to the RCC—to something that one can do at scale on a regional basis, which is professional development of children’s residential workers. You are right: it is an issue.
Lucy Butler
The Government are reviewing the training and development of residential workers and that is to be welcomed because we do not think we currently get it right. There is also something for us to learn from European countries. The social pedagogy model, how much they invest in their residential workers and the value that those workers have is much higher than in this country and you can really see the quality of that support.
Gerald Vernon-Jackson
I left working in residential care because I got too many broken bones and eventually I thought, “Enough is enough”.
Baroness Hollins
I was interested in what you said about learning from European countries. I visited Dresden and saw the public services apprenticeship model for a five-year programme for school leavers, where residential support or support in the community was developed alongside other public service roles with equal salaries at the end of the five years. It was very impressive and they did not seem to have the same shortages of social care workers.
Lucy Butler
That is because it is valued and the training is exceptional.
Baroness Hollins
They trained alongside other public service workers.
Lucy Butler
These are the workers that are working with the most vulnerable children in our society and deserve some investment.
Baroness Redfern
I have to declare that I am the vice-president of the Local Government Association. Can we talk about skill mix within agency staffing?
Lucy Butler
Do you mean social workers or care workers?
Baroness Redfern
I am talking about care workers.
Rachael Wardell
For the most part, the agency debate that rages in the children’s sector is focused more on agency social workers than residential workers. There are agency residential care workers. The challenge for residential care employers is certainly to have an established staff base and reduce turnover. The thing about a residential home is you absolutely have to have the staffing at the right number for the children that you are accommodating and responding to. If you have any kind of staff turnover or sickness absence then you definitely will get agency workers in to cover those gaps.
Baroness Redfern
Is it checked whether they have the right skills?
Rachael Wardell
They will not always be as highly skilled as your permanent workforce.
Baroness Redfern
That makes sense because it will be short notice.
Gerald Vernon-Jackson
If you have to shut because you do not have anybody there, there will be a level but the right skills might be a pulse at the absolute minimum. If you do not have that second member of staff in a children’s home to do the sleeping, then those kids have to be found somewhere else to live. The pressure on people is enormous. Rachael is right: the area we spend a lot of money on is agency social workers as opposed to residential staff.
Baroness Redfern
Is that because of the caseload that is attributed to a social worker?
Rachael Wardell
Partly but also I suppose it is because actually that is the workforce that we mostly have in-house. There are some local authorities in the country that have no in-house residential provision of their own and are commissioning it all. It will not necessarily be visible to them when a provider has an agency member of staff or even several agency members of staff. For those of us that have in-house provision—that includes my own authority—we are much more acutely aware of when we have agency staff in our own in-house settings. It is one degree removed when you are commissioning the place and you do not necessarily see what they are having to do to maintain their staffing rotas on a day-by-day basis.
Baroness Watkins of Tavistock
You have slightly touched on this but we are very interested in trying to identify the main factors that contribute to the continued use of unregistered homes and whether you feel the safeguards are really structured properly in such situations. We have all read that somebody from Plymouth is sent to an unregistered home in, let us say, Blackpool. Why send them and how do you supervise what is happening during that period?
Rachael Wardell
I will speak to that. It is usually a choice of last resort. We would not send our children a great distance or use unregistered if we could avoid it. I have been a DCS for nearly 14 years now and there was probably a time when unregistered provision was cheaper and lawful, and there may have been places that used it for preference on cost. That is absolutely no longer true. Obviously it is now unlawful to place in an unregistered but also the cost is very high indeed. Some highest-cost placements across the sector are unregistered placements and will have usually been specifically created in premises and with a staff that are designed to wrap around a young person who cannot be accommodated anywhere else. The choices that are being made are very different now from how they might have been a decade ago. I cannot obviously speak for the percentage of unregistered use right across all local authorities but I can speak briefly from my own. There are about 960 children in Surrey’s care, which is a low per 10,000 rate because of course Surrey is so huge, of which one child is in unregulated in extremis and actually doing very well where they currently are. Another challenge is that the read-across between regulated setting and high-quality provision that meets a child’s needs is not exact. Sometimes a child is doing better in an unregulated setting, even if we would not have chosen to place them there originally. Once they are settled and the right support is around them, moving them to a registered provision just because it is registered might not be the right choice. Almost every DCS will have a story they can tell you of a time when they have had to move a child into registered because that is obviously the right thing to do but that ended up breaking down really quickly because the child had become stabilised in the other setting. What we tend to be motivated to do is support those providers to become registered, which is why the speed of registration is really important. You have to work with providers, get your setting registered and then we can maintain a registered provision around these children.
Baroness Watkins of Tavistock
If I just take the one child that you have talked about, as a purchaser can you put pressure on CQC to go and visit that place quickly? You are actually telling me that good quality care is being provided to that child. Something that we are challenged by is how long registration takes and we have had people who one believes are in it for the right reason but cannot get the registration.
Rachael Wardell
It will be Ofsted that visits, which is the registering body. What Ofsted will say—we see evidence of this—is that when it knows that a local authority is seeking the registration of a provider, it will try to prioritise it. It certainly tries to prioritise local authorities’ in-house settings to be registered for the same reasons. Again we will all have experienced occasions where we thought it was not as fast as it could be, so it is still an area of concern for us.
Baroness Watkins of Tavistock
That is very helpful to us because we do not know the answer but maybe there is something that could be done around that.
Gerald Vernon-Jackson
I have heard of people having to wait a year for Ofsted to come and register them, which is ludicrous. Maybe something we could or should be looking at is maximum times that Ofsted has to be able to do this piece of work and get a place registered.
The Chair
Is it a capacity issue within Ofsted?
Gerald Vernon-Jackson
Yes.
The Chair
Is it that they do not have enough people registering or is it—as we have heard—sometimes a problem, say, with the local authority getting planning permission for any changes to the property that is required in advance of registration? Where is the balance in this? Where is the real blockage in the queue?
Rachael Wardell
It is not just in one place, which is what makes it difficult. One point of influence recently has been the change in the regulations that meant that supported accommodation now needs to be registered as well. That led to a flood of applications into Ofsted in relation to supported accommodation. Were it to have a representative here it would talk about the fact that it is processing very many more applications than it used to, so to a certain extent there is a capacity issue. Some things that you have described are a problem. Sometimes it is not easy to get planning consents for settings. Sometimes it is a delay in getting a registered manager; for a setting to be registered the manager also has to be registered, so those things slow us down. Sometimes it just seems like things get stuck and we cannot find a good reason. It is a combination.
The Chair
Is it right that a manager who is registered in one home cannot assume registration on another home?
Rachael Wardell
That is correct. There has been a change to the rules in that, if there are two homes closely located to each other, one registered manager can cover two. If a registered manager moves completely to another setting, they would have to be re-registered in the new setting.
Baroness Watkins of Tavistock
Is that partly because there is no central register for registered managers? If you are a registered social worker you can go and work in another place easily, can you not?
Rachael Wardell
Their registration is recorded at Ofsted but the issue is it is not portable.
Baroness Redfern
Would portability help with this?
Rachael Wardell
Yes.
Lord Mohammed of Tinsley
I would like to just stay on the subject of the issues of delays of registration and the impact. Can I probe a bit further on how these delays in registration have impacted your sufficiency planning, whatever the reasons are?
Rachael Wardell
Obviously, for local authorities that are developing their own settings, they will have forecast the occupancy as part of their sufficiency planning. If there is a delay in registration then they are not meeting their forecast sufficiency plans. To a certain extent, though, all local authorities rely on provision by other providers. Again, when we are looking at our sufficiency plans, we look at the extent to which providers are trying to develop their provision in our local area. It is worth saying that in some areas there are more providers than are needed, particularly where property prices are low. Some parts of the country are net importers of children in care; they would probably not want as many settings as they have and would prefer to see them located somewhere else. This is one of the things that the RCCs can help with.
Lucy Butler
Some local authorities, particularly in the south-east, have developed fully staffed homes but they are not registered. That is a really big issue. We were talking about bringing in other providers, maybe from the voluntary sector, but it costs a huge amount of money to staff a residential home and not have children in those homes, which happens; it can happen for six months to a year. That will be off-putting to people without big equity behind them, for instance. That is something for us to consider. We are looking at both what we can do in terms of upskilling residential staff, putting influence on Ofsted and working with Ofsted to address this issue, but also looking at the sufficiency nationally and what we can do to make that more proportionate to where the children’s needs are. At the moment, it does not match children’s needs at all. If you were to do a chart of where children are being placed, it would look incredibly messy because children are going all over the country from different areas. Has that answered your question?
Lord Mohammed of Tinsley
Yes. Maybe this is a question for Gerald, but would it be possible to get at what the cost of that delay is? You are saying you have a home, you have staff trained up but you are not able to take those young people; are we able to put a number to it, so we can make the case to Government, Ofsted and whomever? We can say, “The lack of action or delays is costing the social care sector, ie young people aren’t being given the service and this is the amount of money that is—how can I put it—not being used well”.
Gerald Vernon-Jackson
Shaffaq, I am sorry, I would not have that number.
Lord Mohammed of Tinsley
Could you get it for us please?
Gerald Vernon-Jackson
I am sure my colleagues behind me, who are busily writing things down, will get that for you.
Lord Mohammed of Tinsley
Sorry, I should have declared an interest, how remiss of me: I am also a vice-chair of the LGA. The other thing I would have asked from the LGA is whether it is possible to find out where the biggest delays are in the local authority areas in terms of registration. You said sometimes it is a year. It would be interesting to see where those delays are geographically.
Gerald Vernon-Jackson
Geographically or by the sort of provision that is being offered?
Lord Mohammed of Tinsley
Both, I would say.
Gerald Vernon-Jackson
One of the things that would be helpful out of this is if there was a set time that said, “Okay, Ofsted, you need to have gone in and done an initial inspection and made an initial decision within a month, so that people can get on and get providing that provision”. If you are a social worker faced with a child who is in somewhere that is unsafe for them and you are offered the chance of somewhere that is unregistered but looks good and you think they will be safe, or somewhere else that you are less confident of, then your push will always be to what is going to be the safest for that child; irrespective of whether it has an Ofsted tick or not. We have to trust that that is what the people in social work are desperately trying to do. When I was doing fieldwork, the caseloads were so high that once you had one kid in somewhere safe, you had to move on to the next one who was in somewhere that was unsafe. The pressure is enormous. If there could be some push to get Ofsted to approve places more quickly, everybody would be happier.
The Chair
Is there an opportunity in having a temporary licence or are there too many flaws? You have done that initial inspection and you say, “This looks okay, so we’ll give you a temporary licence” to alleviate the problem you are identifying, but then with a timeframe of complete registration to follow. You are therefore on the path, and Ofsted could prioritise the process from that point and get that up and running as quickly as possible.
Rachael Wardell
Certainly, that is something that the ADCS has explored with Ofsted. We have not yet found the right set of conditions that would make that something it would feel it could do because it would not necessarily want to grant a temporary registration to every setting. If the right set of conditions could be found—
The Chair
The example you gave sounds to me, on the face of it, an ideal opportunity to say, “Okay, let’s get on with it”.
Gerald Vernon-Jackson
It is about analysing risk because we are dealing with children who are at risk or may be risks in themselves, but nothing is zero risk. Leaving places that could provide decent care unregistered is a risk.
Baroness Watkins of Tavistock
I said CQC by mistake before, but we have discussed separately whether some really high-level placements should have CQC inspection as well. I would just like to ask what your opinion is. We have also asked ourselves, though we have not written a report yet: do we just need a different inspection agency to really concentrate on only this, because Ofsted has schools and lots of other things to do? Would there be any advantage in that? This is not being anti-Ofsted; it is just trying to say, “What do you think?”
Rachael Wardell
I genuinely have not given that thought so I am not sure that I could formulate an answer. The right capacity and resources devoted to the registration are essential. On the question of the CQC, the answer is yes. Some clearly need to be clinical facilities, really. For young people at the upper end of adolescence who are likely to transition into adult services, sometimes the best place we can place them is actually a CQC-registered setting that is intended for adults. Of course, that is not deemed to be an appropriate placement for a child but it would help their transition. Something that brought together Ofsted and CQC registrations would be helpful.
Gerald Vernon-Jackson
Going back to things such as the Climbié report, the basis of what we do is looking at social services having been separated off from education and health. For the last few decades we have consistently worked on trying to make sure that those things work together really closely. We used to have a social services department that did adults and children. We do not any more. We have children’s services that try to work across health, education and social care because the problem that was identified was the lack of communication between health, social care and others about the well-being of a child. I would be worried if we worked away from that.
Lord Barber of Chittlehampton
I was going to ask a question about Ofsted, but we have gone well into that so I will just ask a refinement of that and try to build on the debate we have just had. There is a whole issue about the speed of the registration process. There is a real issue about a director of children’s services allocating money to something that we all know is illegal. It just does not feel right under any way of looking at it. I understand the pressures; you talked about the pressures on you and said it was a choice of last resort. I totally understand that so I am not challenging that, but it must be wrong to be allocating public money in an illegal way. Chair, following the debate that our colleagues have just raised, I wondered whether actually the problem is that Ofsted should not be the registration agency but just an inspection agency. If you register something, how can you inspect it six months or a year later? That is questioning your own decision. Is it possible to think through a local authority that is known to be a good local authority in this field being able to register homes itself, knowing that Ofsted will come in six months or a year and that the Ofsted framework sets out what a good setting is meant to do? Let us say with Surrey that you would be able to register a children’s setting and Ofsted would say, “Well, some time in the next six months or a year we’ll inspect that”. You would know that when you made the registration, so you are not going to set it up if you think it will fail its inspection. You might not give that power to local authorities that are of questionable quality. I just wonder if there is something there about increasing the capacity by getting well-proven good local authorities to be able to do their own registration, knowing that Ofsted will keep inspecting.
Rachael Wardell
You could formulate a way that that could work. The challenge would be around those local authorities that might be struggling and therefore would not be allocated that power, but they might still have a problem with sufficiency.
Lord Barber of Chittlehampton
Yes, but if the good ones were doing it that would leave more space for Ofsted. If you took Ofsted out of it altogether, the regional care co-operatives could pick it up. Ofsted does not register schools; Ofsted inspects schools. That is a focused task. This is a muddle of registering and inspecting.
Gerald Vernon-Jackson
There was a phrase around a while ago, “earned autonomy”. If you could demonstrate that you were of sufficient quality, you needed fewer people to look at things because you had earned that by how you operate.
Lord Barber of Chittlehampton
That was a phrase I wrote into the 1998 White Paper.
Gerald Vernon-Jackson
Excellent. I am old enough to remember it.
Baroness Pidgeon
And to have read it.
Gerald Vernon-Jackson
No, Caroline, I will not have read it. You know me well enough; I do not read things.
Lord Barber of Chittlehampton
That is exactly what I am talking about.
Lucy Butler
Can I make a slightly different point about unregistered provision? It is often overlooked but it is a really big issue. Most of the unregistered provision that is made—that is exactly right, it is a provision of last resort—is often one child in one home. The rise of solo placements, for want a better term, has risen exponentially over the last few years. That is a really worrying trend. That is partly fuelled by matching. When providers are judged to ill-match children, they will be penalised by Ofsted. That is a really big issue. What are we doing to our children to isolate them in this way? It often gets lost in this debate.
The Chair
That is a very helpful point.
Baroness Pidgeon
I have to declare that I am a vice-president of the Local Government Association. Lucy, on the point you made, what do you mean by solo placement? Can you just explain a bit more what sort of child would end up in that and what the complexities are? Just paint more of a picture for us.
Lucy Butler
It is not just one sort of child but it would usually be a child that needs support from more than one agency. They may have mental health needs or other needs that need that really intensive support, or they may present a risk to either themselves or others. There will then be a narrative that this child needs to be on their own. We have seen that more and more and it is a real worry. We have seen that as we have seen provision around children shift, with Tier 4 beds decreasing et cetera. As a system, how do we support these children in a way that does not isolate them and enables them to really take part in their local community and live with their peers?
Baroness Pidgeon
I just wanted to get a little picture so I could visualise the circumstances and child. I wanted to pick up on fostering and foster care. We know that two-thirds of children in care were fostered in 2024, so generally more children are fostered. What is your assessment of the recent announcement to recruit 10,000 new foster carers? Maybe we will start with Gerald. What do you see front line? What are the barriers to recruiting foster carers and retaining them, which we heard previously is really important?
Gerald Vernon-Jackson
It is important to remember that we try to do things in levels. First, we try to make sure the kids stay in home. When I was doing social work, parents and grandparents would come and say, “Look, can you look after him? We can’t cope with little Johnny”, and we would say, “No, I’m terribly sorry, they’re your child. We’ll try to give you a hand but we’re not taking them off you”. We try to keep kids in home. Then we try to look at kinship care: other members of the family who could look after them. Then we look at fostering. Only after that do we try residential. Fostering is enormously important. Every council in the country will have been doing recruitment drives for foster carers for the last 30 years without stopping. We always desperately need foster carers. Foster carers provide a wonderful service. The costs double where we rely on the independent sector rather than if somebody were fostering directly through a council; it costs a lot more. The most important bit is the support you give. We are looking after children with higher and higher levels of need; foster carers need more and more skills, and more and more support. Sometimes councils or private agencies are able to do that, and sometimes they are not. It is very welcome to go and recruit and say, “We’ll recruit 10,000 foster carers”. We have had recruitment drives for decades. If the Government can put some welly behind it, great. The other thing is that the children who are fostered are different. It used to be that you would foster small kids; you do not very much any more. It is teenagers. As anybody knows, teenagers are at times stroppy and difficult. I am thinking of myself, of course. It is more difficult. They are bigger. If we could crack the support levels we give to foster carers, that would be great. There are ways in which councils are doing things differently. Councils investing through their budgets and extending people’s homes is a really good way of trying to make sure that it works. Sometimes you will build somebody an extra bedroom and then they will stop being a foster carer a year later, but it all helps. There are ways in which we can do it but I doubt a big bang is going to make a huge difference. I hope it does. If we can think of the support, that is really important. Overall, our budgets are pushed and pushed and pushed. More and more of our budgets are being spent on the high end. We spend less and less on preventive by comparison and more and more just on crisis management stuff. We have to think about how foster carers operate. There have been some places that have thought of almost employing foster carers; I am not sure if that is the right way to go because it changes the ethos a bit. If we could do more to support fostering and kinship care, that could provide an enormous amount of help to take some pressure off.
Rachael Wardell
Barriers are interesting; some are economic. Obviously, that varies in different parts of the country. For some foster carers, there is an economic incentive to becoming a foster carer. In other parts of the country, it is very challenging to think about giving up paid work to care. One of the things we would say is that you do not necessarily have to give up paid work to care; that can be a bit of a myth. The teenagers we are talking about often need someone at home all day, as do very young children. That can be complex for families. There are some good news stories in there. One of the things that we have lost a lot of foster carers to over the years is staying put. In other words, these are children who have grown up with their foster carers and have stayed with their foster carers into adulthood. It is a lovely outcome for that young person, but it means that that family is not fostering any more. We have to really think hard about what the balance of incentives and pragmatic offers is. Things that we can do to create more space in a family home are important. One of the economic impacts recently is that young adults who are the birth children of potential foster carers are staying home until much later in their lives. The space that might have opened up that would have made fostering possible no longer does because families have 23-year-olds, 26-year-olds, maybe even 30-year-olds under their roof at home, and there is no space for fostering. All these things form part of the mix. There is also something about the type of fostering. Not only are we seeing more need in relation to adolescents, but those young people are often in huge distress. They may have mental health issues; they may be a risk to themselves, which lots of people find very difficult to cope with. They are sometimes a risk to other people, and that is very hard to deal with and respond to. We need people with a very particular set of skills. We also might need something that is less permanent than fostering traditionally is and is offered more as a respite for birth parents and wider kinship networks, which is just somewhere safe that young people can spend a bit of time, which relieves pressure in the family. Again, Lucy talked about overseas. You see more of those models in other countries. It would be interesting to see what we can introduce within that target of 10,000 that is more specialist.
Baroness Pidgeon
Lucy, do you want to come in on that? I also wrote down earlier that you talked about end-to-end fostering. I do not know what that means.
Lucy Butler
I would just like to add to what Rachael has said. We were lucky enough in the south-east to attract some funding from the DfE to support foster carers to train therapeutically. It should be rolled out nationally, actually. It is a bit like what we were talking about with residential carers. What is the support and training that we offer foster carers? We could also do more nationally to really celebrate foster carers, such as national exemption from council tax. Are we doing enough as a country to really say, “We really value you as a group of people, and these are the things that we’re going to absolutely guarantee for you to do”? End-to-end is the new policy for regional care co-operatives to support groups of local authorities to come together to do end-to-end fostering. It is a bit of a misnomer because it goes up to the pre-approval process: from when a person might consider being a foster carer, makes contact with the local authority, right through to when they get approved.
Baroness Pidgeon
It is the process for becoming a foster carer, not the process for the child.
Lucy Butler
Yes, that is exactly right.
Baroness Pidgeon
I thought it was some other new thing that—
Lucy Butler
That is the technical term that the Government are using but it does not quite describe what it says, I agree.
Baroness Pidgeon
It is about from getting an interest to becoming a foster carer. As we discussed earlier, your work is far more specialist residential than doing much in this fostering space.
Lucy Butler
No, we are doing things in fostering. As I described, we are looking at what we need to do to support foster carers and how we can support local authorities to work together more collaboratively. We are overseeing things such as quality assurance for local authorities, the media campaigns, the data, and things such as that. We are trying to lessen competition between local authorities and work together.
Gerald Vernon-Jackson
One of the other things that has disappeared over time is not only have we lost placements for teenagers and children in mental health facilities, but within their education we have lost things councils often used to have residential places for, for maybe four nights a week for kids in special educational settings, so that they were at home for only three nights a week. That kept youngsters out of the care system because they were not at home all the time. That has increasingly disappeared as well, so those alternative provisions do not exist.
Baroness Redfern
We have talked about the social care workforce, the skill mix as such. I would like to just drill down on how we have 40% of 19 to 21-year-olds not in education, employment or training. I am asking about the social care workforce. Do they work with these children, helping them with their digital skills et cetera so that they are ready for leaving care?
Rachael Wardell
The short answer to that is yes, inasmuch as we have a lot of duties to care leavers—to those young adults who are care experienced. That includes supporting their education. That may be at a number of different levels. Some care leavers are at university and being supported to thrive in higher education. You are right; obviously, they are overrepresented among young people not in education, employment or training. Councils’ wider workforces have dedicated roles that are looking at NEET prevention, supporting young people into education and employment with training. Therefore, there is a good focus on our care leaver population within that wider work around NEET. You can see that the problem is those numbers are growing. We have not cracked the answer to that. There is more work to do there.
Baroness Redfern
We see 40% NEETs compared with 15% of those who are not care-experienced; it is quite a large difference, is it not?
Rachael Wardell
Yes, it is. It partly reflects the things that cause young people to be out of education or out of employment with training in the first place, which are to do with levels of educational engagement and achievement. The more engaged a young person has stayed in education throughout their statutory education age, the more likely they are to go on to a good destination post-16. For some young people who may have had a very turbulent adolescence, they will not have stayed in school very much and they may not have achieved very high levels of qualifications. Therefore, they have an extra barrier to overcome. The capacity in local authorities to support those young people in that trajectory is in our virtual schools. You will hear talk of the virtual headteacher in the virtual school. That is where your population of children in the care of your local authority are treated as though they are a school population. The virtual head and their team pay close attention to those young people’s educational engagement and achievement. Every child in care will have a PEP—a personal education plan—and that is focused on how they are doing currently and what will stretch and support them. That is a journey that starts at a much younger age. The work we are doing is trying to close that gap for them so they are less likely to be NEET when they arrive at adult age.
Baroness Redfern
Will they be given their own laptops when they are older to help with their digital skills as such?
Rachael Wardell
It will depend. Every local authority will have its own scheme, but yes.
The Chair
Does that planning include their future housing needs?
Rachael Wardell
That is another challenging question. Obviously, we are measured and assessed on care leavers in suitable accommodation. I would like to think that even if we were not being measured and assessed on it, we would care deeply about our young people leaving care and being in suitable accommodation. In unitary authorities and metropolitan authorities, the housing function is part of the local authority. Good relations between the children’s service and that housing authority or department can help some young people find their feet easily. In two-tier local government, that is more difficult. It is not impossible, but you have to engage with all the districts and boroughs in relation to their housing duties. It depends very much on the part of the country you are in and the access for all young people to affordable accommodation at that age. Anywhere where it is more challenging for young people generally to stand on their own two feet in independent living, it will be even harder for our care leavers. It is a task we take very seriously, but it is a struggle.
The Chair
It is a cliff edge as well, is it not? If you do not have that vision moving forward, it can be pretty disastrous for the individual.
Gerald Vernon-Jackson
We all have huge pressure on our waiting lists from people, but in just putting an 18-year-old into a flat on their own you are so often setting people up to fail. You have to work it closely and sensibly. The rule that says that now we have a responsibility for care leavers up to the age of 25 is really good because it means that their cliff edge is less. Sometimes it has worked. I have a care leaver who will be standing for the council, and she is really good. Growing up in care and residential has different things and often unexpected things that mean it is less easy to get work. I talked to one young woman who is really articulate. She was chair of our Children in Care Council. When I was leader of the council, I met with it on a very regular basis because being a corporate parent is so important. She had lived in residential care for quite a while. To try to make sure that young people did not assault staff, there was a rule that if there was something, they would go to court. She ended up doing something that in a family would not have been great but would probably have been survivable. She has a conviction for assault. She wanted to work in childcare. Nobody would look at her. It was not a thought-through thing to say, “Oh, we’re going to stop her prospects of being able to work in the area that she wants to”. Being in care, lots of different things collide in different ways. It is not easy.
The Chair
I absolutely agree. There is no point in having housing without the support around it. Also, if there is not the home, you do not get the support anyway.
Gerald Vernon-Jackson
You need to have a home where your networks are, because these youngsters’ networks are often very fragile. Anything we can do to make sure those survive is really important.
Rachael Wardell
There are a couple of good projects I could point to. One is the National House Project. That is designed to support young people to be able to sustain a tenancy. It works with an identified group of young people and really supports their independence skills. We have been running that in my local authority. Everyone who has been through that programme has really benefited from it. It has landed them safely in independence—they are very well able to live independently at that point. I would really flag that. Another initiative I have seen is group living. Obviously, it is not unusual for young people to live in shared houses but, as a local authority, you can commission that yourself. You can match your care leavers carefully with each other, so they are not living in a shared house with strangers but with other young, care-experienced people and they are supported.
Lord Barber of Chittlehampton
I just have a thought building on what Rachael just said. Over the last 10 or 15 years we have seen a massive expansion of businesses that provide student accommodation across cities, such as Guildford, I am sure, in Surrey, and all over Exeter, where I am the chancellor of the university. There is Unite and these companies. I wonder if there should be a dialogue with them about providing housing that is not solo, for young people in a setting where there are lots of other young people.
Gerald Vernon-Jackson
As I took the train from Portsmouth today, around the main train station are student halls of residence that will have rooms for 400, 500, or 600 students at a time. What we need for people coming through the care process is really small—
Lord Barber of Chittlehampton
It could be designed in when they are being built, not thrown into the whole mix.
Gerald Vernon-Jackson
Being blunt, it is easier just to buy a house. People are not building student accommodation any more because they have probably built too much of it because there were tax breaks that made it easier for people to do that than building homes for families. We have a glut of it. They would be too big. There are alternative ways of doing this that would work better.
Baroness Watkins of Tavistock
We have asked another group whether within Section 106 there should be one three-bedroom with en-suite that could be used in this way.
Gerald Vernon-Jackson
Except so many developers do not do anything through Section 106 because they say they are making less than 10% profit, so they are not going to put money in anyway.
Baroness Watkins of Tavistock
If we just take away the financial and political issues, would that be a good idea?
Gerald Vernon-Jackson
Possibly. The bit that would really help local authorities would be for them to be able to say what sort of housing they wanted. We do not all want masses of six-bedroom or five-bedroom places with three garages, but we are not allowed to do that. The movement within planning regulation is to the exact opposite, to say that councils should be able to have less and less say over what is provided, not more and more.
Rachael Wardell
I will hop in just to mention planning because I made a note to myself to mention it at some point. It is not easy to think of a recommendation in relation to planning for the reason I alluded to earlier, which is that in some places there are too many children’s homes and so you would not want a presumption that planning permission would be granted. However, there are places where it is really difficult to get change of use agreed or to get planning permission to run a children’s home. In an area where there is a sufficiency issue, if the presumption were that that would be granted, that would be a huge help.
Gerald Vernon-Jackson
Having sat on a planning committee, I am going to disagree. If somebody comes to our planning committee with a proposal for a children’s home where we are not confident that the care given would be good, having a presumption in favour just gives people the ability. The good ones will always get through; it is the rubbish ones that we have to be able to find ways of weeding out.
The Chair
Okay, we have noted your two positions on this.
Lord Mohammed of Tinsley
Can I just comment? There is this stigma attached, where as soon as you see a planning application and it is a care home, straight away it is seen as feral kids. Chair, I just have to say from experience of being on the council for many years that Lord Scriven and I had to fight for the care home in a ward we both represented and reassure people. Some of us actually had to be the corporate parents attached to that home. Lo and behold, we did not get many issues but it is the issue beforehand—the fears or perceptions that people have, not the actual reality. Like I say, there is this problem that trying to convert it from a local authority point of view is a real challenge.
Baroness Hollins
My question is about what you think the current priorities should be for the Department for Education to improve outcomes for children in care. First, I have a couple of interests that have come out of today’s discussion. First, Rachael, you mentioned the Best Start programme. I should mention that my daughter works as a consultant to the local authority in Surrey, including on the Best Start programme. Secondly, my interest as a psychiatrist is relevant because I chaired the oversight panel for young people and adults with learning disability and autism who are detained in long-term segregation. Knowing that care-experienced children are more likely to experience mental health difficulties, and what you have been talking about in terms of children with complex needs, that is quite a large part of the context of the question for me.
Rachael Wardell
You have almost identified the priorities there for me, because the single biggest issue probably would be getting the educational response right for children who are in care or on the edge of care. We quite often see that children who come into care, particularly in the adolescent years, had a fragmented or broken educational experience in the run-up to that; that is part of what made it impossible for them to stay at home. It can often disrupt foster care and even residential care. If a child is not in school when they enter care or does not have a school place quickly when they enter care, that drives further problems. Obviously, it also impacts their educational outcomes and then you find them represented in the NEET figures, potentially unable to stay in employment or sustain employment into adulthood. All those other negative outcomes are attached. There is very good public health information that shows that the better education an individual has, the better it is for their life chances right across a spectrum of well-being outcomes. For our children in care, securing their education becomes the highest priority. To just draw out the point that you made around autism and mental health issues in parallel, for a lot of our young people, neurodivergence features in their personal history. Finding education that matches their neurodivergence is so important.
Baroness Hollins
Connected to that, a lot of the children in care may also have had a number of adverse childhood experiences, including exclusions from services, which complicates further their placement. Again, in terms of priorities, how does that work? Lucy, I imagine that the work you are doing might be helpful in that respect.
Lucy Butler
Whenever we can, we should incentivise the joint working between health and social care to support children. That is essential for children we care for. There are also the points we were making earlier about training and development for the workers who are really supporting those children. We need to up our game, to be honest, and really think carefully about how we support this workforce.
Gerald Vernon-Jackson
I would say the ICBs were created to try to pull together health and social care. Some are working but a lot of them are not. Coterminosity between social care and ICBs works well. I know in our area, because we have been pushed into a bigger ICB, that the relationship between health and social care is much worse now and co-operation is much worse. Actually, having coterminosity would have been much better. Inevitably, funding is an enormous issue. Local authorities will be facing bankruptcy in increasing numbers because of adults’ and children’s social care budgets. There has to be an answer to that. Nobody is providing that that I can see. Probably the last bit is trying to work with schools about off-rolling, where increasing numbers of children’s parents are persuaded to remove them from schools. They are not permanently excluded, but the parents are persuaded that it is a good thing to take their child away. That means that probably the most vulnerable children are losing out on education. Ways in which it is possible for local authorities to have some influence over schools—particularly secondary schools—about things such as off-rolling would be really helpful.
Baroness Hollins
That is really, really helpful. That is a growing issue.
Gerald Vernon-Jackson
Yes. Some people will say it is not, but our experience is that off-rolling is a big problem.
The Chair
Presumably that is exacerbated because local authorities have less influence over the strategic planning of their schools.
Gerald Vernon-Jackson
There is no strategic planning for education. It is completely atomised. It would be quite nice if there was some strategic planning.
The Chair
I take your point. Lords, are there any further questions? No. Can I thank all three of you for your very clear answers this morning and your forthright views, which are welcome. I hope we will keep in touch as the inquiry unfolds. I hope you will be able to provide us with the information we have already asked for.