Children's services mutual plans expansion to five councils

Achieving for Children (AfC) was formed in April 2014 to run children's services in the neighbouring London boroughs of Kingston and Richmond.

In September 2016 The Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead Council confirmed that it intended to hand over responsibility for its children's services to the organisation by April 2017.

Documents outlining how that transfer will take place reveal that Achieving for Children wants to expand to a further two council areas - making a total of five - within the next five years.

"Richmond and Kingston had agreed that the Royal Borough [of Windsor and Maidenhead] could join the partnership taking a 20 per cent shareholding, on the basis that they wanted to grow the company to include five local authorities," the council report states. 

"Each new partner would take a 20 per cent shareholding until all five partners, including the founding councils, owned 20 per cent each. 

"If it proved impossible to grow the company to five local authorities, the Royal Borough would be given the opportunity to increase its shareholding to 33 per cent. 

"The timeframe for this expansion was likely to be over the next three to five years."

Nick Whitfield, the chief executive of AfC, was last year appointed as an adviser at Wandsworth Council where children's services were rated as "inadequate" by Ofsted.

It is not yet clear whether Wandsworth, which directly neighbours both Kingston and Richmond, has been identified as a possible area for expansion. Lambeth Council, which neighbours Wandsworth, is also currently rated as "inadequate" following an inspection in February 2015.

Last year, in its Putting Children First policy paper, the government said that by 2020 it wants more than a third of all local authorities to either be delivering their children's services through a new model or be actively working towards a different model.