Commissioning Children’s Social Care: Key policy developments

This is particularly the case for residential child care – dominated by the independent sector which provides 70 per cent of placements – with settings concentrated in parts of the country where property is cheapest.

Sufficiency strategies are a key tool for council commissioners in their placement planning work. These documents provide key information about how local authorities manage markets, engage providers, co-ordinate provision, and steward services to meet their sufficiency duty and accommodation needs. However, research by What Works for Children's Social Care (WWCSC) last year found that 44 per cent of authorities did not have a publicly available up-to-date sufficiency strategy. Of the 81 strategies studied, most councils reported that the cohort of children and young people in care is becoming more complex and thus increasingly expensive to place within residential provision.