Commissioning Care – Research evidence: Sufficiency report

What Works for Children’s Social Care (March 2022)

This work was commissioned by the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care. What Works for Children’s Social Care analysed 81 sufficiency strategies covering 84 English councils.

It is known that commissioning practices vary across authorities, but how specifically they are addressing these challenges and engaging with the residential care market is not well understood. Research by the Local Government Association in 2021 identified sufficiency – the ability of councils to secure suitable accommodation and care that meet the needs of children in care – to be the main problem facing children’s residential provisions.

This is often attributed to poor co-ordination between councils and providers and issues related to the severe lack of residential supply. Several commissioning innovations and frameworks have been developed such as regional and sub-regional frameworks to address this problem and to help authorities access the residential provisions they need. However, the success of these efforts to improve commissioning outcomes is currently unclear. Moreover, little is known about what other activities are being employed by councils to ensure sufficiency, and to what extent commissioning innovations and frameworks have supported authorities to achieve better outcomes for children.