Following the valuable pathfinding trial of the new Regional Care Cooperative (RCC) model in Greater Manchester and the South East, the Government has announced that it is to establish six new RCCs.

What are RCCs?

RCCs are a response to recommendations raised by the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care in 2022, and form part of the Government’s strategy to reform how the children’s social care system works. 

The goal is for RCCs to be the ‘body’ responsible for the planning, commissioning, and delivery of ethical, purpose-led, children’s care placements - acting on behalf of local authorities across the region for which the RCC is responsible. 

RCCs bring together stakeholders from across local authorities, Integrated Care Boards, youth justice, and the police, together with other stakeholders, to create a coordinated multi-agency approach to children’s placements. You can read more about the role of RCCs in the Government’s policy statement here. 

RCCs are tasked with:

• delivering high-quality provision for children’s care, including strengthening the children’s home workforce in the area;
• understanding local needs and availability of the right types of placements and forecast future demand and supply; and
• sharing data and collaborating with other agencies to improve services and coordination. 

The pilot schemes in Greater Manchester and the South East have garnered a positive reaction from the Government, and you can read more about their impact so far here. 

What’s next?

The Department for Education is now beginning the next phase of the rollout - the creation of six new RCCs - and has opened applications for local authorities to participate. Details about the application process can be found here. 

These changes sit against the backdrop of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which continues to progress through Parliament. The Bill proposes to introduce a power enabling the Government to, after consultation with local authorities and other stakeholders, direct local authorities to form a 'regional co-operation arrangement'. Such an arrangement would extract the strategic accommodation functions from one or more local authorities to be placed with another authority or body corporate. In short: the RCC model. 

What does this mean for providers?

The advent of RCCs, therefore, means that children’s care placement providers will be seeing a shift in approach to how their services are commissioned and supported by local bodies and agencies. RCCs will serve almost as the lead commissioner for a region, rather than being fragmented across different authorities - greater monitoring of quality and cost can also be expected as RCCs seek to achieve cost savings, whilst ensuring care needs are met for children in their region. Ultimately, care providers will need to evaluate what the potential changes mean for their services in the regions in which they operate. In the pathfinders, there is clear evidence of ‘business as not usual’, for example, the collaborative procurement exercise by Greater Manchester Combined Authority that we are helping to shape.

There is a clear government appetite to advance regional collaboration to deliver change in the delivery of children’s care placements across England, and the success of the initial RCC pathfinding exercise means RCCs are gearing up to have a starring role. 

We will be hosting a joint webinar in the autumn to explore commissioning, with a particular focus on RCCs and the impact they are likely to have on children’s social care providers. More information will be shared soon.

If you have any questions, please get in touch.