Uncorrected oral evidence: Children’s social care

Oral evidence, 14 October 2026.

Shazia Hussain

I was going to speak first, if that is okay. I will start with the introductions. Hi, everyone. I am Shazia Hussain. I am one of the directors in children’s social care in the Department for Education. I cover the earlier bit of the system, help protection and the social work workforce.

Helen Waite

I am Helen Waite, also a director of children’s social care in the Department for Education. I cover the care end of the system. Together we should have all angles of children’s social care covered today.

Lord Johnson of Marylebone

Good morning. Good to see you both. Thanks for coming in. I want to start with a question about outcomes for children. How well is the children’s social care system meeting the needs of children in care currently? How should we define a good outcome for a child in care? What evidence do we have that the system is delivering good outcomes, and how do we measure that over time?

Helen Waite

I will start, but we will probably go at this one together, if that is okay. We are on a significant journey of reform in children’s social care. Much of this has stemmed from the independent review of children’s social care, which was led by Minister MacAlister, who is the current Minister for Children and Families, which presented numerous recommendations in relation to the way that the system was currently not working, frankly, and the outcomes for children are not good enough. We are on that journey of reform at the moment. To get those outcomes in a much better place, you have to start at the start in relation to prevention and the investment that we are putting in that space; we can talk a little bit more about that as we go through. In terms of the current outcomes, we know that children are much more likely to not be in education or employment. The Milburn report that is due out is obviously very relevant for us, and we have been inputting into that in relation to the support that care leavers receive. We know that stability is a crucial factor: children being in homes or foster care, where they are persistently moved, where they are not placed within their communities, means that they have not got stable lives, they have not got the relationships around them to support them to thrive. They may not have stable educational attendance, which also impacts on their educational outcomes. The outcomes are not good enough at the moment. We have a package of reforms that we would love to talk to you about today that would address some of that stuff. This summer, some of you will have seen that we published a review of care leaver deaths—a tragic and hard read—which really spotlighted the fact that if you are a care leaver, you are more likely to die sooner. That also presented some opportunities for us to think about transitions and how the system operates as children come through the system.

Lord Johnson of Marylebone

I wanted, though, a definition of a good outcome.

Helen Waite

Sorry. A definition of a good outcome is that outcomes for those children should be as equal as they are for other children who are not in the care system. I think government, through its corporate parenting duties, has a responsibility to ensure that children ideally are supported not to come into the system and are supported to stay with their families and thrive. Where they do come into the system, we should look after them, support them and invest in them through all agencies and public services which should wrap around them to provide the advocacy and support to get better outcomes.

Lord Johnson of Marylebone

Outcomes need to be delivered within a budget and in the context of constraints in public spending. Children’s social care now accounts for 27% of local authority spending, up from 18% in 2011-12. We have heard that spending has risen much faster than the number of children needing care, and the average cost per child in care has risen by a third in real terms since 2015-16. Could you help us understand what is driving this increase in costs, and how can we judge whether local authorities are getting value for money from this expenditure? Finally, how do you define value for money and what is the baseline and counterfactual that you are using to measure that from?

Shazia Hussain

Should I start? As you said, the overall number of children that are receiving social care services has remained broadly stable over the last decade, but the number of children entering care has risen, and that is where a lot of the cost in the system is. A child going into care incurs foster care costs and residential care costs, and in particular, the costs of residential care have been rising. That is in part due to the complexity of the children that now present. Children are presenting at a much older age than they would have done, as a result of prevention spending over the last 10 to 15 years declining because local authorities sought to protect their statutory spend. Following the care review, we have made a £2.4 billion investment in prevention so that we can build back some of those preventive services. We have our Families First pathfinder, now a national programme, trying to get to children earlier. A key part of our strategy is to keep families together. We think that is a key outcome of some of the reforms that we are doing; where they cannot do that, it is to stay within their family networks. That is both better for some of the outcomes we were talking about earlier, but will also help reduce the flow in. I do not know if you want to touch on some of the measures around the care system.

Lord Johnson of Marylebone

How do you measure VFM? What is an acceptable amount for a local authority to spend to achieve a good outcome for a child in care?

Helen Waite

It comes back to what we invest in prevention. We saw local authorities whose preventive services had frankly all but disappeared. Therefore, if children are reaching the care part of the system and coming into care, as Shazia has said, with much more complex problems, not having the right wraparound support around them from Health, from Justice, from other agencies, means it is much more difficult to achieve an outcome when a child arrives in that position. By bringing support up front, we have a much better chance of ensuring they come out with a better education, better support and more stability.

Lord Johnson of Marylebone

I am not sure I am hearing you explain how you evaluate VFM in the context of achieving a good outcome. What is a reasonable amount for a local authority to be spending in a given circumstance?

Helen Waite

I do not think we have put a number figure on that. The way that we are evaluating the Families First programme is that we expect to see a reduction in the number of children entering care. That is through additional preventive support and we are also diverting numbers into residential care through a much greater focus on kinship and a much greater focus on fostering and increasing the number of foster care places available. Children that do come into the care system are more likely to get a better outcome if they are in a family environment.

The Chair

Can I just check, Lord Johnson, that you have no interests to declare?

Lord Johnson of Marylebone

No, no interests.

Baroness Shawcross-Wolfson

I apologise to the committee for arriving late. I wondered if you could just push a little bit on the preventive measures. I am particularly interested, following Lord Johnson’s themes about value for money, on whether we know what works if you are a local authority and you want to invest in preventive measures. You mentioned Health wraparound and Justice wraparound, but what evidence is there, for a local authority, about where the best place is to put your marginal pound and what support makes the biggest difference? Or does that evidence not exist?

Shazia Hussain

We have got pretty good evidence on the preventive end of the system: evaluated programmes on specific issues. The Supporting Families programme is one of the main ones, which showed that, for every pound spent, you get £2.40 back. That described the practice that works with families: having a key worker that can help you navigate all of the wider public services that you might need. That is a key plank of what we are now saying that local authorities need to do in practice, which we have codified in our programme guide that we tell them to follow. There are a number of other similar kinds of What Works evaluated programmes. We are managing it as a government major programme. We say, “Here are all of the things that have an evidence base”. They are a mix of interventions: if this family has a specific issue, try this type of intervention, and general practices of working with local authorities. That is codified in a programme guide. We have quarterly monitoring with every local authority in the country—how they are performing against those things. Where we are worried about local authority performance or practice, we have support mechanisms in place with experts that can go and help them transform their services. It is a richer area of understanding what works. I would say less so than in the care system. We have got a decent evidence base.

Helen Waite

I would add that, on the £2.4 billion that we have injected into the system over the period of this spending review, we have put it in through the local government funding settlement and have ring-fenced it. Although ring-fencing fell away in the past, it has broadly been welcomed by directors of children’s services, who have struggled in more recent years to hold funding in the prevention end of the system. As we have learned over time, when prevention spend falls, statutory spend goes up exponentially, so we are injecting this cash. We are effectively having to dual-run slightly in this rebalancing: we are having to put more money into prevention until we can bend the curve to improve the outcomes we are looking to see in the reduction in numbers of children going into care. On where we have built the evidence base, we have worked with foundations—they are our equivalent of a What Works organisation—and this is focused on different aspects of support for parents. In designing the programme, we worked with 10 pathfinder areas, which were 10 local authorities around the country. We required co-design with not just the local authority; we required health and police to be at the table. How do you design services that are fit for a local community? What are their needs? Yes, you take on national evidence, but how do you make it bespoke in a way that meets the needs of those particular families around that set of schools in that particular locality? How do you support a family to navigate it? As Shazia alluded to there, we have a family help worker who will co-ordinate everything—the multi-agency response that is required around that family. A multi-agency person will stay with that family as needs ebb and flow, so families do not have to persistently come back in and tell their story time and time again, become frustrated or feel stigmatised. We want to remove the stigma so that prevention really makes a difference.

Shazia Hussain

I have one final point: the place where we have the strongest evidence base is on family group decision-making. For every £1, I think you get a return on investment of £3.80 back, but it is also proven to reduce entry into care. We therefore legislated for that, and we have put quite a lot of prescription around how local authorities do that, because we are so confident in the evidence base.

The Chair

Can I just again confirm that you have no interests?

Baroness Shawcross-Wolfson

I have no interest to declare.

Baroness Watkins of Tavistock

I have no interest to declare, either. But I am very concerned and was shocked to read that, two years after leaving care, nearly a third of care leavers are homeless. I understand this focus on prevention at the beginning of life, but what can we do to improve that urgently? We know that, once people are homeless, all the data shows us what a disaster it is.

Helen Waite

Yes. Through the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act, we legislated to ensure that local authorities are publicising the support that is available for care leavers, but of course that is not enough. Again, we start slightly in front of a child becoming a care leaver, with all the things we can do in advance of that. We published a paper called the Enduring Relationships document, which is really designed to think about children in care and how we build those really important relationships with people that will stay with them when they leave the care system and become adults. That is not about just being the personal adviser at the local authority, who obviously should help the individual to navigate whatever support they need, but how they keep contact with their auntie or cousin—with the people in their community who will stay with them and provide that safety net, effectively, around them. It is really centring around enduring relationships. On support for care leavers, local authorities should absolutely be publishing their offer. The Act also intends to expand corporate parenting responsibilities significantly, with all agencies across government, all schools and the health service having corporate responsibilities and duties to ensure that those in care and care leavers are supported. That is an expansion of the current arrangements. We are also going to be rolling out Staying Close, which we legislated for: that is targeted support for those most likely to be at risk of homelessness. It provides supported housing and the wraparound care that stabilises the individual in that housing, supports them to live independently and secures ongoing tenancies beyond that. We will be rolling it out across every local authority across this spending review period. We have been working with 47 local authorities so far. We have slightly refined our expectations based on what we are learning of what works. We are going out to another 15 local authorities at the moment, and we will expand to all areas after that.

Baroness Watkins of Tavistock

I can hear the optimism, and I am really hoping that it is proven to be right. But I am aware that there are people of 20 who have been in care who go to A&Es across the country and report that they have nowhere to live while they are being dealt with for whatever they have gone to A&E for. Will the statutory duty then be on hospitals to ensure that they do not go back on the street after that attendance? I can hear how you are working with local authorities; I am frustrated with the other end—and I am, by background, a mental health nurse, just to declare that.

Helen Waite

There is probably more to do in the way that the broader system comes around an individual, in taking those corporate responsibilities seriously and acting locally to bring about change. We see a lot of variation in the way that housing teams within local authorities interact with the care leaving teams—you would think that would be an obvious connect, but it can be disparate. There is more to do there. The Prime Minister has stood up and clearly said that rough sleeping is top of the agenda, and we are working really closely with MHCLG to improve action on rough sleeping and homelessness more generally, with a focus on care leavers.

Baroness Redfern

Thank you for coming. I, too, have nothing to declare. My question is regarding Staying Close support, as you have just mentioned. The main sources of support for carers often hardly know the young person and are often unaware of the young person’s history and context. I wonder how that can be improved.

Helen Waite

That is interesting. That finding came through in the care leaver deaths review, titled You Really Are on Your Own. It really shone a light on the fact that too many care leavers really are on their own, that they do not have the support and that people do not understand them. There are those transitions, particularly on health, if I am honest, around moving from children’s support, where they may have finally got some mental health support; we had cases where children had diabetes and died because their support was not transferred over into the adult system. There is much more to do to make sure that those transition arrangements are right—but right from a multi-agency perspective, not just reliant on an individual within a local authority. We are definitely in the foothills of what we are learning on Staying Close. We have redefined the model so that it is much more about the home itself and the support that comes with it. When we initially set off on the Staying Close journey, we were a bit more fluid about what might work for an individual, and we have realised we need to be tighter to get the outcomes and support that are needed.

Shazia Hussain

The only other thing I would add is that, at every step, we are trying to get a further step back: on working with children when they are in care and making sure that you are finding the people who can build that network around them. As Helen said, that sort of ambition is set out in the enduring relationships strategy. Once you have lost those opportunities, it is really hard to build people up to have a good transition out. Those things need to happen together, because it is quite difficult to find relationships for a 20 year-old: they are less likely to be engaged with their personal adviser and the local authority. You need to be starting that much earlier in their care journey.

Baroness Redfern

Would you think it is about building trust?

Shazia Hussain

Yes, but it is also about preparing them for the fact that the professionals will not be there for ever. We have had such a focus on building relationships with social workers and personal advisers, but, at some point, those people disappear. The shift in focus that Minister MacAlister has driven is towards finding the people who are in their wider networks—the people who they grew up with and around them who are safe—who will support them through that, so that, as professionals step away, they have a wider kind of family to be part of.

Helen Waite

On the reform journey, that is almost question number one when local authorities are engaging with a family. When there are early signals that things are starting to go wrong, one of the early questions is, “Who’s your support network as a family? Do your neighbours help? Have you got an auntie around the corner?” If you route in right from the beginning that you need a network around the whole family, and if things then go wrong, that network has already been contacted. They are already aware, so it is not a crisis phone call at the point at which a child may be going into care.

Lord Mohammed of Tinsley

Chair, I also do not have any interests to declare. I want to talk about another area of outcomes, or the lack of them: NEETs. What sort of interventions do you think we need to do? Clearly, that cohort of young people, when they leave us as corporate parents, are more likely to be NEET than your average young person. What sort of things can we look at pushing to ensure that they get the best start in adult life?

Helen Waite

These children, more often than not, have been through something fairly traumatic, so we should ensure that they get the right support at the right time. As we have said, stability is critical, but we see too many cases of children being moved placements—sometimes moved around the country, sometimes even to the other end of the country—so it is difficult. It would be unsettling for any of us to be doing that on a regular basis, but this breaks schooling arrangements and does not support children to have great attendance and therefore get a better education, which gives them the best shot at going on to further or higher education or into employment. We have the virtual school head network. Every local authority in the country now has to have what is called a virtual school head. It is a bit of an odd name, but their job is to support all children in the locality who are looked after. They might be at a range of schools, but it is about making sure what is going on with their attendance and whether there is anything they need—again, being a sort of parental advocate to step in and see whether there are additional needs in place. Children in care have a higher propensity to have special educational needs. Again, there is something in tandem with the reforms that are going on around special educational needs to ensure that this group of children, who do not always have the parental advocacy to push for the right support early enough, are seen, and that that support is put in place more quickly. Coming back to your question, it is about supporting those children to thrive by creating as much stability as you can in the circumstances that exist. Wherever possible, that should be in a family environment. We are aiming for a massive expansion in fostering so that children do not have to go into residential homes but can be supported in a family environment. Those arrangements should be close to home so they can keep those enduring relationships and their schooling. Then, as they come into the care leaver system, we should ensure that we have great arrangements with DWP and that support is available for them to look for work.

Lord Mohammed of Tinsley

Can I press you on the support? There are a number of initiatives, such as the job guarantee, but the issue is that you have to have been unemployed for 18 months. That is quite a long time for a young person. Do you think there is an argument for looking at some of those national programmes and specific issues. Why can we not guarantee that on day one for people leaving care, knowing that they are going to be the ones who are likely to have all these other complex issues? “Why wait 18 months?” would be my argument.

Helen Waite

For some programmes that the DWP runs, there are arrangements that care leavers can access earlier. I know you are from Sheffield, and it is interesting that the South Yorkshire combined mayoral authority is running a programme with DWP at the moment that is really focusing in on NEETs, and a specific piece of their work is about care leavers. It will be interesting to see what we can learn from that and whether we can spread that learning. The Alan Milburn review is under way at the moment, and he has made reference in the interim report already to the need to focus more on care leavers. The point that we have added to that is that, yes, we need to think about care leavers, but again we need to come back to children still in care. If you are going to push careers advice, work experience or whatever, how do we make sure that children in care are at the top of the pile for that sort of support to further reduce their risks of becoming NEET?

Shazia Hussain

I have a couple of things to add. We talked earlier about Staying Close. Stable housing is almost a precursor to being able to get a job and stay in that job. These things are complementary and we definitely hope that, if someone has somewhere to live, they are not worried about being kicked out of their tenancy and they are being supported to maintain that tenancy, they will be able to secure a job, keep the job and so on. We have examples of that, both through our Care Leaver covenant, where other employers can pledge work experience, internships and so on, and through public sector internships. The Civil Service internship scheme recently reached 1,000 care leavers having been through that scheme. So there is a combination of things, but your point about the mainstream is, as Helen says, one that we have been pushing at.

Baroness Nichols of Selby

I have a slight interest here, as in my other role I represent people working in the social care sector and have done for about 40 years. I was a bit anxious about the value-for-money element of this. For me, it is about how we can change young people’s lives, often from some really bad starts. Obviously society has changed over the years, and the needs of these young people are much more complex. We have to get to the bottom of that. The value-for-money element for me is in changing their lives, making them not go into shops and shoplifting but giving them employment so that they can then have a normal life. It is about support, I think. At one time, all care leavers were guaranteed an apprenticeship with my local authority, and that was a start. It went a bit haywire when the Future Jobs Fund was scrapped and now we have got the apprentices levy, but I do not think we use that as much. I do not know whether there is something that you can maybe tie in with that. My authority was a forerunner with the No Wrong Door programme, where it does not matter what complex needs you have because there is someone in these multi-agency teams now who can deal with everything for a family, rather than having four or five social workers or care co-ordinators going in to do that for them. Regarding value for money, if we support people and give them a good start in life, the health service will not need to give them as much support. Some of the issues for me have been about budget constraints over the years for local authorities and the move away from the looked-after bit and on to the foster carers. I worry that, because there are more complex needs, people cannot cope in their own homes. Those are all the things, for me, that we need to be sorting and being part of to make that better, because, if their lives are better, the lives of everybody around them will be better as well—and for the families.

Helen Waite

Yes, it is about the right support at the right time from the right professional and then working together, rather than families being left to navigate. We are doing a piece of work to think about the purpose of residential care. We believe that the vast majority of children who come into the care system should be in a family setting. That is why today we have launched our first ever fostering national campaign. We are aiming to get 10,000 more foster places by 2029. That is pretty ambitious, but we feel that children are better supported within the family environment, and obviously that comes with the need for us to think about support for those foster carers with, as you say, a changing cohort of children who come in with differing needs. How we support those foster carers is one huge plank of our work in that space. The other is that some children will still need residential care, so what is the purpose of that residential care? Who are the specific children who require that level of support? In providing that, and accepting that there is always going to be a cost to that, how do we make sure that we get the best value for money by providing the right wraparound support? That will often require complete integration with health services. Again, we have just announced—we have lots of announcements at the moment—the Home Again programme. Our new regional care co-operatives, working with ICBs, will specifically target those children who are on the edge of a deprivation of liberty order due to their welfare needs, or indeed who already have a deprivation of liberty order against them. Those are the children who are most high cost and most at risk, who often are not in appropriate accommodation or getting support, and nor indeed are their families. How do you support the child but, importantly, support the family as well in order to navigate that child out of residential and ideally back to a family environment, be that their own family or a fostering environment?

Baroness Hollins

You have mentioned increasing complexity, and I wondered if you had an idea about the range of needs that children are displaying now. Sorry, I should say that I have no interests to declare, but I was a child psychiatrist and had a specialism in learning disability and autism for many years before I retired. I am interested in the range of different therapeutic support that children with complex needs might need, and whether the system is sufficiently joined up to enable that to happen. There is also the question of their continuing needs at 18, because a lot of these children are not going to be able to live independent lives. You spoke about fostering; should we be thinking about adult fostering? I am thinking about how complexity affects the picture that you are painting for us.

Helen Waite

We can talk a bit about rising demand and where we are seeing the shifts in that, which Shazia can talk about in a second. When it comes to complex needs, through the Home Again programme we have commissioned a specific tool to assess the needs of a child much more effectively, with medical support, which then drives the right action, often medically related, around the child, with the anticipation that that could mean medium-term or long-term support and intervention that stays with the child whenever they are in residential care, but also backs out of the system once they go back to families. I do not know if Shazia wants to say a bit more about that.

Shazia Hussain

I said at the beginning that over the last 10 to 15 years, because of the reduction in prevention activity, we have seen children presenting later, so the harm has been happening over a long period of time. We have not got in early enough when they are five, six or even younger, so that, by the time they eventually present, those needs, both in the family and for the child, are quite entrenched, and it is a much harder and therefore more expensive type of placement to do the right kind of work with the child and their family. We have to shore up the family environment so that the child can return, which is important, but we have also seen a change in the harms that children experience. The change in age range is also linked to a rise in extrafamilial harm—not just online but grooming gangs, county lines and so on, so we have not really had to deal before with the things that we are dealing with. Helen talked about us having to redefine the purpose of residential care. We have had a system that was designed to deal with children who struggled to stay in foster care. The next step was residential care. Things like the Home Again pilot are really starting to do exactly what you are asking: what are the needs? How many of those are mental health needs? How many of those are SEND/autism related? What is it about the environment? When we have really expensive placements, the ones that cost half a million pounds a year, that is because we do not yet know what the right treatment is, and we have high staff ratios to contain children because we have not quite worked out what the prescription is. That is what the pilots are designed to do.

Helen Waite

Yes, we have pilots doing that, and the review on the purpose of residential is under way. We are trying to home in on which cohorts of children are best supported in that environment and what training and support the workforce should have in residential; it is a workforce that has not been reviewed for many years. So this is a real opportunity, a moment in time, for us to understand what we want from our residential system and change the way it operates.

Baroness Pidgeon

I do not have any interests to declare. It is interesting hearing you talk about the work on prevention and what you are doing in that space. You have touched on the issue of residential care. Clearly, that sort of care is the right intervention in some circumstances, and it is important to recognise that. It is not always safe for some children and young people to be at their home. You have also talked about complexity and older children, and I think that is something we will want to explore further. Could you expand for me on what assessment you have made of the residential care market? You have mentioned regional care co-operatives, which, I have to say, before preparing for this meeting, I had not particularly heard of. Could you expand a bit more on that and what role you think they will be playing in this area?

Helen Waite

We honestly think that the market is not functioning in the way that it needs to. It is no secret that expanding costs mean that the system has moved to the point where about 83% of it is private sector and the rest is public sector and not-for-profit, and there is significant geographical variation in relation to supply and demand. One-quarter of our provision is in the north-west, but one-quarter of the children who need that provision are not in the north-west. We do not have enough provision in London or the south-west. That is why we end up in a situation where local authorities are scrabbling around for the nearest provision and seeing if it is good enough? Does it meet the needs, potentially on a Friday afternoon, when they are trying to find an urgent placement for a child with complex needs, where their existing placement has broken down or the child is at significant risk at that point in time? Crisis decisions are being made where ideally you would not make them in those circumstances. To go back to the outcomes point, in no world is it good if a child is living in London but gets sent off to the north-west. That is nothing against the north-west; you want children to stay in and around their communities to be supported. Stability is really important. So we are rolling out regional care co-operatives. They are designed to provide some economies of scale around local authorities and to improve commissioning arrangements. Often, we find that local authorities are doing spot purchasing when they are in those crisis situations. They do not have the economies of scale themselves to be able to drive a market that is shifting significantly at the moment. We are seeing new private providers coming in all the time. Again, some of those will be brilliant and some of them will not when it comes to their ability to decipher what good looks like in terms of cost, value for money and, importantly, quality when it comes to the changing dynamic of that cohort. For the regional care co-operatives we have had two pathfinders, one in Greater Manchester, operating across the Greater Manchester combined authority footprint, and then one in the south-east. They are still fairly fledgling in terms of what we are learning from them. What we are doing a lot of at the moment is refining what we want those organisations to achieve. About two weeks ago we announced five more regional care co-operatives across the country, so we will be covering more than 100 local authorities, with an expectation that ICBs are signed up. They have signed up to the application process. We need health to be much more part of the story and the commissioning arrangements. Those boards must be chaired by an equivalent chief executive-type role, someone with seniority who is able to drive the sorts of budgets that exist in this space. There should be an expert in public commercial arrangements in order to drive the commercial arrangements that we want to see. Those are the headlines regarding the regional care co-operatives.

Baroness Pidgeon

That is theoretical at this point. There are the two pathfinders you mentioned, but that is very early days, and then there are the five new care co-operatives. When is this going to be rolled out across the whole country, and when do you expect to see serious changes to the commissioning, hopefully driving down the costs of these placements in residential care?

Helen Waite

I would expect that we will start within a year, and hopefully sooner. First and foremost, the new five are bringing into place their chief executives and their board at the moment. They are doing a thorough review of sufficiency across the local authorities in which they are operating, really understanding cohort and current supply, demand and cost arrangements. Once they have done that analysis, it will enable them to prioritise where they would go to try to achieve a better commissioned arrangement, where we might have particular issues with complex needs, and where we need health to step in and potentially support further. We have announced two of our Home Again programmes, which I mentioned just now, so far: one is in Merseyside and Cheshire, and the other is in the West Midlands. They will work through the RCC arrangement.

Baroness Pidgeon

Okay, but we do not have evidence yet, and there are concerns about the boundaries of these and how they link with ICBs—although, frankly, we do not know what ICB boundaries are coming; from the debate yesterday, their boundaries seem to be in a state of flux as well. If you want to get ICBs involved, how will that work if there are not clear boundaries?

Helen Waite

There is no doubt that it is a challenge. I have talked to my team about there being a kaleidoscope of boundaries across all public services at the moment, which makes it difficult. That is, frankly, what makes it difficult now for a local authority. It is the same again with the regional care co-operative in some places. Wherever we can, we are trying to align around strategic mayoral authority footprints, be that one footprint or sister footprints—as we have with Merseyside and Cheshire—so that we can try to keep step with where we are with wider public sector boundaries at the moment. We think the relationships between those organisations are critical.

Baroness Pidgeon

Thank you. Finally, the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act had several measures in it aimed at managing the social care market. What will be the impact of the market management measures, and how will you be assessing this and on what sort of timescale?

Helen Waite

We put a number of measures into the Act—a huge number related to children’s social care—but, in relation to the market, I suppose the biggest one that people are focused on is the profit cap. We have put that in as a backstop measure, so that we are able to bring it forward at a point we think is necessary. We do not have the information yet to be able to apply a profit cap. Therefore, we need to take a number of steps to learn more about how the market is working and, ultimately, to decide whether that is necessary. Regional care co-operatives are gripping sufficiency and those commercial arrangements: value for money, cost and quality. We are rolling out a data platform. At the moment, we have no national picture for cost and quality that enables us to take more informed decisions. We think stuff will be better done regionally; there may be a question about what we learn from that data and whether there are some things you might do nationally—if you have a very slim cohort of children, for example. That is to be learned from and worked through. That will be rolled out by the middle of 2027. Our regional care co-operatives will hopefully have also made good progress by then. I would like to think that, by the end of 2027, we will have a much richer picture of the market and the way it is operating. If I can quickly say so, we are investing over £500,000-worth of capital. We are doing this in our secure provision, building two new secure homes in London and the West Midlands because they have no provision for secure homes at the moment, and we are refurbishing other secure homes and doing some rebuilds. This is to make sure that, where children are in secure provision, it is right and fit for purpose and provides the support that it needs for when they leave that environment. We are also investing in what we call open children’s homes—normal children’s homes—and that investment is targeted at children with complex needs. We have awarded those local authorities that have sufficiency issues and are committed to providing additional capacity for complex needs. There is a bit of market reshaping there in the way the Government are stepping in and making some market adjustments.

Baroness Pidgeon

There is so much going on, from what you have said, in this space, and it is really exciting to hear. Here is what I would like, probably in writing to us. Some of these will take a few years to be able to be assessed, but how will you measure success? What are the different metrics that you are using to measure the performance of each of these interventions? If you were able to write to us with that, that would be really helpful.

The Chair

On a point of clarification, as I may have misheard what you said, is the intention to have the RCCs on all the mayoral footprints, even if they do not match with ICBs, and not the other way around?

Helen Waite

This is a decision still to be taken by Ministers. The way we have designed the current ones is to try where we can, and where we know mayoral authority exists, to align with that footprint, which, in most cases but not all, has a match up to ICBs—I mean, it is quite live, with the movement of boundaries. We would want to align where we can, not create additional random boundaries.

Baroness Shawcross-Wolfson

Do you see RCCs taking on specific responsibilities and functions from local authorities? Where RCCs exist, are you thinking that there is a set of activities that will no longer be done at local authority level but will be done at a regional level? If so, could you set out precisely what they are? If not, and it is more about the RCC providing additional capacity to support the local authority in their functions, could you clarify exactly what that capacity will be? I am very interested in Baroness Pidgeon’s question of how we are going to monitor whether this additional capacity actually supports outcomes.

Helen Waite

At the moment, the statutory responsibility will remain with the local authority, and that is our expectation. Again, there are lively conversations at the moment about devolution and how things will operate, but, at the moment, we expect that local authorities will continue to have the responsibility to place the child, and in a relevant setting. The regional care co-operatives will have some capacity, and there is an expectation that funding will be pooled from local authorities so that they can optimise the available budget to negotiate better prices and quality and to better meet the needs of that group of local authorities. That is not easy either; it is challenging.

Baroness Shawcross-Wolfson

You said that there is an expectation of funding being pooled. Is that saying, “We are going to make this happen” or just, “We hope it happens”?

Helen Waite

In the legislation, we have set out that we can require local authorities to be part of a regional care co-operative: there is an arrangement there where we can make that expectation clear. Obviously, the big case for local authorities is that the care market is not working as it stands at the moment; by having specialist support, including specialist commercial support in place, you will hopefully have a better menu of support in front of you for the children that present to you—on a Friday afternoon or whenever it is—and be able to place them in something more suitable and closer to home.

Baroness Shawcross-Wolfson

I am so sorry, because it is obvious that I am missing something. Local authorities will be required to give some money to the RCCs so that the RCCs can do collective purchasing on their behalf—is that right or wrong?

Helen Waite

It is right that they are expected to pool their budget. These budgets are huge, and the regional care co-operative would be expected to commission the placements and go into the commissioning arrangements. I think it is still to be determined and worked through whether a local authority then chips in at that point and provides enough money for 15 places or whatever it might be, or whether they put their money in up front.

Baroness Shawcross-Wolfson

How much money is also to be determined and worked through?

Helen Waite

As part of setup arrangements for an RCC, what they are doing at the moment is determining what their local sufficiency arrangements are. If they have 10 local authorities in their patch, how much are they currently spending on residential—what type of places and providers? How is the fit across the local area? Do they have the right support in the right place? What does that tell them about the gap analysis and, therefore, what needs to be purchased in the future? Which supplier would they not want to use in the future because the quality is not good enough or it is not meeting the demand in a certain place?

Baroness Watkins of Tavistock

I want to clarify a point. I can understand this regional devolution, but one thing that has worked well in the health service over the last decade is specialist purchasing for really rare conditions, so that you do not have 12 different commissioners trying to argue the toss. Because you need really expensive equipment in some of those centres, everybody has accepted it, because you cannot have 20 of something for a relatively small population. I just cannot understand why, for those with really significant needs, we are not looking at something for England around defining the requirements, working with CAMHS and others, and saying, “This is what we want”. It just seems to me that we are getting eight or 10 teams to do something that, for that very high-level need, could be defined centrally. Could you comment on that?

Helen Waite

That is something we would be happy to explore as we learn more from regional care co-operatives and as they understand what those gaps are. It is no secret that, working with MHCLG, we have looked, and will be looking again, at those half-a-million-pound or even half-a-billion-pound placements and what those placements are paying for. Are they providing the right support? What is the integration like with health? Where is Health doing direct commissioning itself? Is that working well or not, and how can they combine locally?

Baroness Watkins of Tavistock

Thank you for that answer. I think it is constructive.

Baroness Hollins

I am concerned about the idea that some children just have to be in residential care. There is a big move to try to develop small supports in local communities, close to families, to help children and adults to have more ordinary lives, rather than making this financial investment in residential care, which is often going to be a long way away. When we know that people do better in small groups that provide permanent settings for them, I do not understand why the investment is not in small local support instead. I know it is more complex and requires good interpersonal skills, relationships, therapy and so on, but why this, at this stage of a young person’s life?

Helen Waite

I do not think we disagree with that at all. That is why we are doing the work on what the purpose is of residential and which children it could support, and that might be for a very short period of time while needs are stabilised and the right support is put around them. However, the vast majority are much better supported by their families or in fostering care with the right support around them, again with the right health support needs around them as well.

The Chair

I will ask the next question—I have no interests to declare—and it is about unregistered homes. Accepting that you are undertaking a lot of activity at the moment, over what timescale do you hope to stop the use of unregistered homes? What steps are you taking to ensure that they are not still part of the system in a timely way?

Helen Waite

Obviously, the use of unregistered is illegal, but we know it is a practice that still happens. In combination with Ofsted, we are looking closely at this at the moment. Through the Act, we have introduced powers for Ofsted to be able to fine providers that are operating in this way. We have undertaken a deep dive with 15 local authorities around the country to get under the skin of why they are using this provision, getting them to talk us through the cases in their area and tell us what has happened. Very often, it is that spot purchasing arrangement on a Friday afternoon when there is a crisis and there is no provision available, so unregistered is used, maybe for 24 to 72 hours. Again, that is not acceptable, but it is what happens: a need is presented and that need must be met. It might be for slightly longer where a particular organisation is seen to be able to support a child very specifically with their needs but they are not registered with Ofsted—or indeed they are in the queue to be registered, since one of the other issues that we have is that the queue is ever-growing, with more people trying to enter the market. We have done some work with Ofsted to better sift the queue so that we bring to the front of the queue provision that is being paid for by the department, by government capital investment, making sure that that is brought onstream as quickly as it is built. There is also the question of geographical location. Where we have sufficiency problems, we have to make sure that those areas are able to register relevant provision as quickly as possible. There is also more to do when it comes to the portability of registered managers. If a registered manager moves to a different home because the organisation is set up and it might be something that is outstanding, that provision cannot be registered until it is sat in the queue and gone through the system. It is an area we are taking seriously. We will have our first ever set of DfE data on the unregistered published in November. That gives us a proper baseline of placements in the unregistered system that we can work from. At the moment, Ofsted does an annual review, but it is a bit of a snapshot in time. We hope that this first set of evidence will give us more insight and allow us to target our support through our regions group that operates within the department.

The Chair

I am slightly worried that the current system is that you are sifting through to put who is at the top of the queue and who is at the bottom of the queue when the intention, I hope, is to not have that queue because we should not be using unregistered. Do you have a timeframe in which you want to completely negate the use of unregistered homes?

Helen Waite

We have not set a deadline on that. As I say, we are working really closely with Ofsted, which also looks at this within their inspection arrangements to again understand that, while it is illegal that these homes are used, what are the circumstances in which the provision was used? Was there an alternative available at that particular moment for that particular child? The data will tell us if we are starting to have an impact on the use of that provision. Again, for regional care co-operatives, this is absolutely going to also be on them in terms of understanding sufficiency needs in their area. If they have a local authority that is using unregistered provision, there is obviously an immediate question about what the regional care co-operative might be able to do to support them to back out of that circumstance.

The Chair

But you have not set any time frame for resolving that problem.

Helen Waite

As quickly as possible, but we have not set a deadline.

Lord Johnson of Marylebone

The average cost of an unregistered placement last year was £10,500 per week, according to our briefing—roughly half a million or £546,000 annually. Apparently, there were 36 children in placements that each had a cost of more than £1 million a year. Does the department have the data to establish whether these extraordinary costs might be justified in any way by the complexity of the care needs of the children in question? Related to that, what objective criteria would you use to set a profit cap so that you did not inadvertently penalise providers providing high-quality care to children with very complex needs?

Helen Waite

We have not got the richness of data on those high-cost placements. We have worked with MHCLG, we have run some surveys in the past with them and, and the Local Government Association, to try to find out more about those placements. Again, I know we sound like we are going to be relying a lot on the regional care co-operatives. We are expecting a lot from them in relation to their assessment of sufficiency, which should also include a review of individual costs of placements, which again will provide an opportunity to see, of the highest-cost placements in a locality, what are the services that it is providing? What are the needs of those children? Can you get to a position where you might have a price-banding arrangement where it is legitimate that very high-cost placements will exist for the very highest needs of certain cohorts of children? That in itself will also inform more about cost breakdowns and how providers are behaving. We have also introduced a financial oversight scheme within the department that is doing a deep dive on the cost analysis of the top 40 providers of children’s social care. We have just stood that up; it is another form of data that will be coming to us during the course of the year. That, combined with the data collection that we will be doing nationally on placements and the intel that we will receive from regional care co-operatives, will start to give us a richer picture on costs. I think it is very challenging for the department to work out what the right level of profit is in this space. Not least, that is because we have 83% private sector-led providers. I need to check the number, but I think it is about 20% of that number that are private equity. There is a risk that, as soon as we start chasing profit, we start chasing our tails around people’s accountants and how many can be moved around. We need to go in with our eyes open in terms of building that data picture first on the richness of costs, the costs for particular cohorts of children, before determining whether a price-banding system or a profit-cap arrangement is the right thing to do. We are conscious of the fragility of the market as well: in moving to that too quickly, there is a risk that those providers disappear. We cannot afford for that to happen either, because we have children living in homes that need to be there.

Lord Johnson of Marylebone

Are there circumstances in which a £1 million annual cost could be justified?

Helen Waite

Yes, potentially—I would need to look at that. With very high-cost health needs, where you have round-the-clock support from potentially multiple carers, you can imagine that becomes more costly.

Shazia Hussain

Yes—or high staff ratios with rotating teams so there is round-the-clock care.

Helen Waite

Yes—for the individual’s safety and the safety of others.

Lord Barber of Chittlehampton

This is an important area of the discussion, and I very much appreciate the quality of the debate so far. Chair, following your question, on the face of it, if you step back from the detail that we are discussing, we are saying that there is a whole range of provision—which is costing a lot of money—that is illegal and routinely used. You begin to wonder whether the English language has a meaning for “illegal” when we have that. It is not an acceptable solution. I appreciate that DfE colleagues are talking about solving it, but I just want to say this, based on something I worked on for a long time in Punjab, Pakistan. The moment a provider receives state funding—Lord Johnson has described just how much that funding sometimes is—that provider should be subject to all the regulatory provision, including Ofsted inspection, that goes with receiving state funding. We cannot have a situation where the state funds something that it knows to be illegal and does not even provide any quality assurance arrangements. I have not heard the DfE colleagues, who are answering very well, answer that point at all.

The Chair

We will now get an answer.

Helen Waite

Very often, these providers are waiting to be assessed by Ofsted, which then brings them into the regime. I appreciate that that should potentially be the other way around. Directors of children’s services, who make these decisions locally, are assuring themselves as to whether that is an appropriate arrangement given the circumstances that are in front of them at that particular moment. They will look at the staff who are in place and whether the locality of the house or the home is suitable—albeit these are decisions that, ordinarily, they would not want to be taking at all.

Lord Barber of Chittlehampton

We are allowing directors of children’s services to commit an illegal act every time they do that—is that what you are saying?

Helen Waite

That is what happens, yes.

Lord Barber of Chittlehampton

I rest my case.

The Chair

We will follow up. Thank you, Lord Barber. Lord Nichols—I mean Baroness Nichols.

Baroness Nichols of Selby

Thank you, Lord Bradley—I will see you in the office later. On the points we are raising about the costs, if we have to wait until the new bodies are set up, most of us could probably find an example, currently or in the past, where a local authority has spent that kind of money on a child; I wonder whether you could look at some of that in the interim, rather than waiting while these new bodies are set up. I am certainly aware of one: in my area, there was a threat to take the health board to court because it would not cough up half of the costs, and it needed to—I am talking of £2.4 million there. Maybe you could look at some of those in the interim and find out. I do not know whether I would ever believe that a cost around that would come to £2.4 million, but there were very complex needs. In another area, the staffing ratio for one child was 6:1 because of the complexity, and the needs were still not being met. There is some information out there that you could maybe have a look at, and I am sure we would appreciate having that information on a confidential basis—we do not need to know who or where they are; whether those costs were inflated, if you like, is the bit we would all like to see.

Helen Waite

We can certainly take that away and come back with a couple of examples. I should say that, where I have pointed out the work we are doing with regional care co-operatives, we are obviously continuing to work with local authorities alongside that: we have done that deep dive I mentioned on the 15 local authorities in relation to unregistered homes. That work continues while, at the same time, we set up for future arrangements.

Baroness Shawcross-Wolfson

Can I go back to this point about unregistered children’s homes? I assume—naively perhaps, but, I think, rightly—that no director of children’s services is sitting there wanting to use an unregistered children’s home. It is when you are faced with the position where, in an evening, you do not have an alternative, and so, at that moment in time, that is the best option for the child—I think that that is likely to be the case. I wonder if you could help us with this thought experiment: if we said collectively, or Parliament or Ministers decided, that we want to stop this and will give ourselves a month, two months or six weeks to stop the use of unregistered children’s homes, what would that require in practical terms? Exploring that, we may discover that it is just not possible to do in one, two or six months—but what would need to be built and commissioned? Do you have a sense of the scale of financial commitment it would take? How could we end this problem?

Helen Waite

I think that is right. As part of the deep dive that we undertook with directors of children’s services, their going through the list in itself has prompted some action around how quickly they can move a child if they are unregistered—it was the right decision at the time, but have they moved them on quickly enough, and was it temporary enough? There are some cases like that. We spoke to a director of children’s services over the summer, who talked about the arrangements that he had made by going through that list and making sure people were moved on. There was, interestingly, one case where he still felt it was the right decision: it was a rural location, the child was in a very safe environment, the provision around them was absolutely right, and it would have disrupted their schooling if they had been moved to a different locality. There can be some very specific circumstances where it is still the right thing to do. The importance there, of course, is in making sure that that provision gets registered as quickly as possible.

Lord Barber of Chittlehampton

Sorry—just to chip in again on this, that exchange totally makes sense. If they are necessary at certain moments, do we not need to change the law to make it legal and change the regulatory processes so that these people are brought within them rather than continuing to act in illegal ways?

Helen Waite

That is something we certainly need to look at and Ofsted is pursuing at the moment.

The Chair

Maybe it would be better to get them registered more quickly.

Baroness Watkins of Tavistock

One thing that has struck me in this conversation is this: we are looking at our own problems and we acknowledge them, but have we looked in any way at international comparisons? For example, when I speak to people in New Zealand and Australia, I do not have any evidence from the people I have spoken to that they would be in this scenario. Are we in a really awful place compared with, say, European countries that I do not know as well as the two I have mentioned, or do we not even look at what other people are doing?

Shazia Hussain

I do not know specifically on residential care, but I know more broadly. Some of our family network reforms are based on the fact that some of the countries that you mention have always prioritised keeping children with families within their broader communities. That is a thing we have in common, including using foster care. We have definitely seen a growth in the use of residential. I do not know whether that is out of step internationally, or whether you know that. Certainly, our family reforms have more in common with others.

Baroness Watkins of Tavistock

Thank you. That is very helpful. My gut reaction is we should be making some observation about the research that needs to be done for the long term. I know we cannot do that in three months, but it does seem quite important to me.

Helen Waite

We understand that the provision in Denmark is very good, and there is an arrangement: as part of our reviews on workforce and on the purpose of residential, we will be looking at Denmark specifically.

Baroness Redfern

Helen, you mentioned about growing the number of foster placements by 10,000. Could you break that down into full-time and part-time foster carers?

Helen Waite

I cannot, if I am honest. We want 10,000 additional places for children, and, as part of that, we want all sorts of different arrangements.

Baroness Redfern

I wondered whether one was growing more popular than the other.

Helen Waite

Oh, I see. As part of this campaign, we want to be able to reach a group of people who have perhaps pondered foster caring and thought that it is not for them because they work or do not own their own house—they have ruled themselves out before they have ruled themselves in to explore whether it will be appropriate for them. Someone in my team fosters, but he does weekend respite foster caring for a family to give them respite periodically. There are all sorts of different arrangements. What we want to do, through our first national campaign ever, is really open people’s eyes to what they can do. Of course, we need full-time foster carers as well—we really need them. But, in having that mix of types of foster carers, we are aiming not just to have lots more foster care placements available but to include some choice. That will provide local authorities with not a “panic match” but being able to ask which will be the best family—are they in the right locality for the school, with the health services support that they are receiving, so that we can really support the transition if a child needs to come out of the family home and into care?

Baroness Redfern

If there are part-time carers, they might be more interested, in certain circumstances, in saying, “I think we can do some full-time fostering”. Do you know what I mean? It is to encourage.

Helen Waite

Yes, definitely. Sometimes, people who might initially come in part time and test whether it works for them may then move towards full time. Alongside the kind of recruitment, we need to think and are thinking about retention as well. How do we provide the support around that family? What does that look like? How do we meet their needs? That might be matching between a full-time foster carer and somebody who does some weekend foster caring, so that you can provide that support.

Baroness Redfern

Is there a need for support for kinship carers if they need—I do not know—extra accommodation and that kind of support?

Helen Waite

Specifically on fostering, in relation to accommodation, we are rolling out something called Room Makers. This is about existing foster carers who are brilliant and would love to have another child in their home but do not have the space. That is a capital programme where we will convert the loft or garage and create some more space for the family.

Baroness Redfern

Is there extra funding for that, when is it made available, and how much is it?

Helen Waite

Yes, there is: it is available from now in our foster hub locations around the country, and it is £25 million across the spending review period.

Shazia Hussain

For broader family networks, within our Families First Partnership programme, which we talked about, where we are investing £2.4 billion, there is provision within there to do family network support packages. If you have had a family group decision-making meeting, or if you have not and have identified a way of shoring up the wider family network, money can be spent via that programme if the thing that you need is some adaptation to the house or whatever it might be. We are seeing local authorities not use that provision as much. We are currently on our second iteration of our programme guide: we have learned from the first year and said, “Here is a set of things that you might want to do”. We are trying to encourage more local authorities to make use of some of that provision. The only other thing to say on foster care is this: one of the misconceptions has been that you always have to make a lifelong commitment. That is maybe true, but it should be true in fewer cases. We have a big focus, through the prevention work but also in fostering, in trying to get reunification with the family, particularly where the family circumstances may be, for example, domestic abuse while the mother sorts her housing arrangements, et cetera, or there is mental ill health in the family and that passes. We are always trying, where it is safe and there is not abuse in the home, to have foster carers that have that as a route out as well.

Baroness Redfern

There is the affordability issue for foster carers as well, is there not?

Shazia Hussain

They are definitely cheaper than residential care.

Helen Waite

Yes, they are significantly cheaper. A local authority would, obviously, for all sorts of reasons, select foster care over residential if it is appropriate and the right match. Foster carers obviously get paid a fee through the local authority as well, and some local authorities will band the level of fees that they pay a family depending on the complexity of need of the child or the arrangements that they have in place. There are various arrangements that local authorities have, from deductions on council tax in some cases through to accessing leisure passes or free swimming at the weekend—whatever it might be to really help the foster carer financially.

Baroness Nichols of Selby

I want to turn to the subject of the people who are obviously pivotal in delivering this for families and children: the workforce. In the report we have in front of us, in 2023-24, the department identified that social work capacity was at highest risk, but that was removed in 2025 because turnover rates had improved. A number of local authorities are reporting that that has now moved backwards, and that is probably about workload capacity and the complexity that people have to deal with. What do you think? What assessment have you made recently of the state of the children’s social care workforce?

Shazia Hussain

It was in 2022 that we escalated this to a set of people who are responsible for our department’s top-tier risks: the performance and risk committee, which looks at the things that are most serious. At that point, we were incredibly worried about sufficiency. That was manifested in the overall number of social workers we had and in the workload statistics—how many cases each person was dealing with. We were worried about the level of agency use. It is incredibly expensive; local authorities have all sorts of constraints, and we have spent quite a long time talking about some of the things that drive their costs, but agency costs were part of that problem. Also, those workers cycle in and out; when we want stability for children, it is not brilliant to have turnover in that way. We were also worried about people leaving the profession with burnout due to workload. It is worth saying that, in de-escalating the risk, it is not that we do not think that those things are a problem, but we have more confidence in the programmes we have in place and have certainty that, certainly for the rest of the spending review, those programmes will be in place, and we have two to three years of improving data. I was not let off the hook the first time I went to the performance and risk committee—which was a year earlier—and said, “I think this is ready to de-escalate”. They said, “No, you need to wait for another year of data”. Of the programmes we have in place, a set of them are about recruitment—attracting people into the profession. The department supports a certain number, and we have modelled a continuation of those. Those are people from within local authorities who want to switch careers, as well as graduates. That is making a difference to sufficiency. In the latest numbers that I have, in 2025, we were at 36,200, which is the highest we have had since 2017, the first point at which we started recording. Vacancies are down 17% from 2024—we saw a huge improvement in 2025. Agency social work is down 17% from 2024 too, turnover has improved, et cetera. Across every metric that the department monitors, we saw a significant improvement. As well as our workforce entry programmes, we took action on agency social work. We have talked quite a bit about some of the work we are doing on regional carers, which is much more complex, difficult and slightly more fledgling. On agency, we did not use the law—we have now taken a power to put some of the work that we have done on a statutory basis—but worked to establish regional memorandums. Quite a lot of what was pushing the price of social workers up was that people were competing for them. Within localities, there are regionally agreed price caps; regions are required to report to us on a quarterly basis on whether anyone is breaking those. There are arrangements about post-qualifying experience: you cannot graduate into the workforce as an agency worker; you have to have three years’ post-qualifying experience in a local authority before you can move out to an agency. You cannot leave a local authority one day and appear in a neighbouring local authority as a social worker; you have to have a three-month wait. This is a set of things to constrain the agency workforce. At the time, the market that operates agency workers said that we would lose all these people, who would leave the profession. They have not: we have seen them return to the permanent workforce. We are much more confident in the supply side. On development, we have talked quite a lot about the complexity that social workers are now dealing with. We are investing heavily in professional development. For quite a long time, we have had an early career programme, which is for a year, and we have just launched—well, we have just procured somebody to develop the curriculum materials for—a two-year early-career support programme for lead child protection practitioners. We are saying that, if you go into child protection, it is much more skilled and generic standards are not enough to do it, so this is how we will support you in developing that aspect of your career. There are other strands for people who are leading family help teams, et cetera, which will come on board later. It is worth saying that we did quite a lot of work with ADCS and LGA workforce committees on the things they were telling us social workers needed, such as more CPD, more support, more group supervision, et cetera. The final thing on workload is this. We are doing two things. When I talked about the Families First programme and the evidence-based programmes that we are putting into prevention, quite a lot of them told us that, sometimes, the intervention works best when it is not with the social worker. The social workers carry statutory responsibilities and there is a lot of stigma and fear: families do not always want to engage, because they feel that that is quite serious. The earlier, preventive bit of the system, building on things such as the Supporting Families Programme and the family group decision-making model, all of which used non-statutory workforces, is investing in building up a multidisciplinary workforce. We do not yet have a rich picture of what that looks like; we have only just started collecting data on what sorts of workforces local authorities are building up. They might have a huge issue with domestic abuse or a particular clinical mental health thing, and they will have freedom to spend that money on a multidisciplinary workforce that sits within the local authority. That reduces the social worker workload—and they are not equipped to deal with those cases, so they were carrying cases and thinking, “I don’t have the skills to deal with all this variety and complexity”. Those are just some of the things we are doing. The national professional development offer will come on board later in 2027—I cannot quite remember the date. We have just concluded the procurement, we will be making an announcement very shortly as to the lead supplier, and then the suppliers will start developing materials so that local authorities can get their staff on to those offers.

Baroness Redfern

I have a quick question: do you think a region’s workforce vacancy rate is heavily linked to the performance of its individual councils, where they require improvement or are judged inadequate by Ofsted?

Shazia Hussain

Yes, definitely, but it is incredibly complicated. We know that you are more likely to be inadequate, as judged by Ofsted, if you are in a more deprived area, as there is more strain both on local authority finances and on their families. There is a perfect storm: it is really hard to be good in those places, which is why particular parts of our country have more performance challenges, and then, if you are judged inadequate, you see an exit of the workforce. That is where we would see people—I was going to say “from Bradford” because that is where I am from, but I know others in the room are, too, so I will say A and B—leaving a place and going to a neighbouring authority because it has a better judgment. Some of the things we talked about earlier, about constraining that movement, are quite important. I do not believe people turn up to do a bad job—that is rare. There are contextual factors, and those might be external to the local authority or might be about broader corporate leadership. We have an intervention and improvement function in the department that is delivered through our regions group, who work with us on understanding which places the department needs to wrap around. To go back to workforce slightly, we are no longer a top-tier national departmental risk; we are monitoring every local authority, looking at what is happening to the numbers that I talked about. If, alongside our other set of numbers, we start to worry, we are supporting individual places alongside the national programmes that I mentioned, whatever the specific prescription might be in that area.

Baroness Watkins of Tavistock

I have the last question, and I will make it slightly longer. What is the department’s assessment of how effectively Ofsted is regulating and inspecting the children’s social care sector? Secondly, as we discussed before you came in, is CQC ever working together with it for residential care? Does that provide an opportunity or a problem—does one go and then the other goes separately? We wonder whether you think there should be an inspectorate for just this, which could be fast and rapid rather than designed in the current system.

Shazia Hussain

The ILACS framework looks at the local authority children’s social care function overall—not the settings, which it also inspects separately. We are currently working with them to align the intervention framework with the direction of reform. It is quite tricky, is it not? We have set out a new agenda and are saying that these things now matter: we want to see local authorities prioritising family, with this sort of practice, and doing these sorts of things when making residential care decisions or whatever it might be. We are working quite hard with them to align the two, and I think we have good alignment. They have consulted on their changes now that our changes are law. From next year, we will have an inspection framework that is lined up to what the Government think good looks like in policy and legal terms, and then they will go through a period of piloting those inspections to see how they are going to work, because there will be some changes around that. It is definitely worth saying that, until quite recently, we in the department placed—I think rightly—a substantial weight on an Ofsted judgment in the action that the department takes. If a local authority was inadequate, we would take quite heavy action; if it was good, we would not. We have just moved into a slightly more nuanced place than that, because it can be a number of years before something is reinspected. We are now monitoring what we call a key set of system health data alongside that. This comes into the department on a quarterly basis. We are using both—we have the Ofsted judgment, including monitoring visits, and our own data—and we make a judgment as to whether we want to find out what is going on and perhaps provide some support earlier. Helen, do you want to cover SCCIF?

Helen Waite

We are also looking at the inspection of children’s homes, which is called SCCIF. Ofsted does joint targeted inspections with CQC and the police inspector—

Shazia Hussain

That is HMICFRS.

Helen Waite

Yes—the far-too-long acronym. These inspections do not happen that frequently.

Shazia Hussain

They tend to be thematic, such as on neglect or sexual abuse.

Helen Waite

I think it is legitimate for us to think about what more we could do in the future as we begin to look at the purpose of residential and therefore what the inspection arrangements look like, but Ofsted is in lockstep with us in the reform journey. Its consultation, which covered SCCIF and ILACS, closed in September, so we expect it to be coming out with its response to the consultation, and the changes that will be coming into effect, in the next couple of months.

Baroness Watkins of Tavistock

I think I have heard that you might want something more tailor-made for the care homes—or is that a misinterpretation?

Helen Waite

No, it is not a misinterpretation. We have an ambition to work much more closely with Health across the whole of the children’s social care system.

Lord Barber of Chittlehampton

I was struck when reading into this area myself—and I have learned a lot again this morning—by the gap between the outcomes, which are pretty poor for all kinds of reasons, for which I am not blaming anybody, and the Ofsted judgments, which seem to think that children’s homes are generally rather good. There is a kind of disconnect. It made me wonder what Ofsted actually does when it does an inspection.

Shazia Hussain

That is a really fair comment. It is interesting, is it not? I do not know whether you meant educational outcomes, lifelong outcomes, et cetera. The new SCCIF will be different, but it has essentially looked at what is in the gift of the children’s home—whether it is providing safe care and all the right professionals are there—and has not looked beyond that, because it would consider someone’s educational outcomes to be out of the control of the home. Some of the changes that we are hoping to make are through the inspection framework but also through the direction that the Government have set that, if you are in a parenting role, we are definitely concerned about the overall outcomes.

Lord Barber of Chittlehampton

It is interesting, because, in the schools area, Ofsted starts with the outcomes and then, sometimes, when the outcomes are good, does not even bother with any inspection—but this is the reverse. I think there is something fundamentally flawed in the way this is happening.

Helen Waite

Yes, there is the system join-up—really thinking about the child’s journey through the system. We designed the Families First programme through a co-design arrangement with those local authorities, and we thought about how education, health and police supported the family. I think we are into that space now with care: enduring relationships is a hook for us to get into who the people are around the child and, importantly, how is the school amplifying the support needs of that child? If attendance is not in the right place and where it needs to be, what is the expectation on the children’s home, frankly? I think we are getting towards that, but we are not there yet.

Lord Mohammed of Tinsley

I will be really quick. Thinking about the outcomes, maybe we need something such as payment by results: you may be keeping the child safe in the setting, but, if you are not preparing that child or young person for the world beyond, are we getting value for money? As we spoke about earlier, there is £500,000 to £1 million-worth. Maybe they may not be the people ready to go to work, but there might be an argument for payment by results here if a substantial amount of money has been invested, and, as corporate parents, it is our responsibility and we are not getting it. That is just a comment.

The Chair

I have a final question on Ofsted. Providers are required to notify Ofsted of serious incidents. Recently—I think between April 2024 and March 2025—they received 42,500 notifications, of which 57% were recorded as “Other”. Are you satisfied that Ofsted and the department understand what “Other” means?

Helen Waite

No.

The Chair

Would you look into that and write to us about what “Other” is?

Helen Waite

Yes.

The Chair

Are there any further questions from the committee? No. Well, thank you very much for your time this morning and for being as informative as you can in a very shifting scene of care. I will officially close the session.