Minutes:
The Chair introduced Sir Alan Wood, Chair of the Residential Care Leadership Board (RCLB), to the meeting. Sir Alan Wood provided the Board with an update of the progress of the RCLB’s work so far, outlined achievements, current challenges faced and sought guidance from Members on how to take additional work forward.
· Sir Alan Wood highlighted the recommendations taken forward from the Narey Report on children’s residential care. The RCLB has focussed on improving placement commissioning and supporting pilots of the Staying Close initiative for young people from a residential setting.
· Sir Alan Wood explained the aims and challenges faced to date. With regards to commissioning, the focus is on building capacity in secure children’s homes. The biggest challenges surround availability of beds for children placed on welfare grounds, high placement costs and the lack of provision in certain parts of the country.
· Sir Alan also highlighted that, while lack of capacity was certainly the primary issue, there were also many examples of placements being unavailable despite apparent under-occupancy in some homes. While there are some legitimate logistical reasons for under-occupancy (the physical condition of the home, the needs of young people already accommodated, the skill and expertise of staff to meet the specific needs of the young person needing a placement)Sir Alan Wood welcomed comments from the board on how best to drive up occupancy to allow more children to benefit.
· The Board agreed that further work needs to be undertaken to understand why some homes are at capacity and others under-occupied. A query was raised around progress with previous plans to introduce national commissioning of secure children’s home placements. Sir Alan explained that the RCLB’s focus had moved to the regional commissioning of secure children’s homes, and that groups of local authorities would be encouraged to come together and submit proposals to increase capacity in their own region. This would be supported by a small central fund to provide feasibility studies.
· With regards to geographic placement of open children’s homes, Sir Alan reported that the lack of children homes in London results in a lot of London traffic moved to the North West or the South East regions which displaces children. Sir Alan Wood raised the issue that local authorities are increasingly removing themselves as direct providers and now 80% of providers are commercial institutions compared to only 20% which are local authorities. This places further strain on local authorities as the nature and complexity of children’s needs are changing and there is still not enough supply to meet demand.
· Sir Alan Wood drew the Board’s attention to the particular challenges encountered in accessing services offering effective therapeutic support, not least due to a lack of clarity on what is meant by “therapeutic”, nd argued that there needs to be an increased level of specificity on this point from both providers and commissioners.
· Sir Alan Wood acknowledged the stigma of past events and children’s homes and expressed that this can cause hesitance about local authorities building new ones, which is a potential obstacle. He did, however, highlight a number of examples of local authorities beginning to build new homes, while acknowledging the difficulty in identifying suitable sites in some parts of the country.
· The Board asked whether areas where providers are not providing have been identified, and what action could be taken in these circumstances. Sir Alan explained that there is capacity for this, but without regional choice it has made this more difficult. The Board agreed that a system in place that focuses on regional placement for regional need is the right approach as it would provide accountability and be much more effective.
The Chair expressed her gratitude to Sir Alan Wood for speaking to the Board. She echoed the recommendations put forward by the Board that, while a focus on regional arrangements was an appropriate response to the current position, further consideration should be given to the national role in secure children’s home commissioning and focus should remain on the relationship between local authorities and private providers of open children’s homes. and
Decision
The Children and Young People Board noted the update provided by Sir Alan Wood.