Impact of delays in care proceedings on
Children's Services
Project context
The pressures in the care and judiciary system have led to significant increases in the length of care proceedings. However, when we started working in this area in 2021, little was known about the financial impacts of these delays on children’s services locally and nationally.
In 2021, the average duration of a care or supervision case was 45 weeks, the highest since 2012. Only 23% of cases were disposed of within 26 weeks – the statutory time limit introduced in the Children and Families Act 2014. Many local authorities had raised concerns with the DfE about the adverse impact that delays in care proceedings are having on local services, vulnerable children and their families.
In order to get a better understanding of the scale of the issue, the Department for Education (DfE) commissioned Mutual Ventures (MV) to investigate the impact of delays in care proceedings on children’s services, with a focus on the financial impact.
This work has been commissions by the Department for Education and has been delivered in two phases. from December 2021 to April 2022. The key focus has been on the analysis of the financial impact of these delays, which so far has not been well-researched or fully understood.
PHASE 1 was delivered by Mutual Ventures (MV) over a period from December 2021 to April 2022. MV worked with children's services across the country, carrying out a deep dive exercise which involved workshops with frontline staff and team leaders followed by a detailed data-gathering exercise to identify and quantify the source and impact of the delays.
This information was then used to develop a tool which allows the user to model the financial impact of the delays for children's services. user to model the financial impact of court delays for children’s services. The model can be used by individual local authorities or children’s trusts to understand the potential financial costs that delays in proceedings create. It has been also used to extrapolate the financial impact at national level.
In Phase 1 Mutual Ventures worked with six Local Authorities and Children's Trusts to collect information and data, these were:
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Achieving for Children
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Birmingham Children’s Trust
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Bolton Metropolitan Borough Council
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Calderdale Metropolitan Borough Council
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London Borough of Wandsworth
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Northamptonshire Children’s Trust
PHASE 2 will be delivered between October 2022 and March 2023 and will focus on expanding the project across 100 Local authorities to help them use the financial impact model and offer practice support to address the care proceeding delays.
MV will also be engaging with the care and judicial system to support the development of realistic cross-system responses to key issues relating to the identified delays.
Project overview
This work was commissioned by the Department for Education in two phases. Phase 1 ran from December 2021 to April 2022 and focused on the analysis of the financial impact of these delays. Phase 2 ran from October 2022 to March 2023 and focused on a national rollout of the tool, including wider sector engagement.
Phase 1
Phase 1 was delivered by Mutual Ventures (MV) between December 2021 and April 2022. MV worked with children's services across the country to carry out a deep dive exercise, which involved workshops with frontline staff and team leaders followed by a detailed data-gathering exercise to identify and quantify the source and impact of the delays.
This information was then used to develop a tool which allows the user to model the financial impact of the delays for children's services. The model can be used by individual local authorities or children’s trusts to understand the potential financial costs that delays in proceedings create. It has also been used to extrapolate the financial impact at a national level.
In Phase 1, Mutual Ventures worked with six local authorities and children's trusts to collect information and data:
-
Achieving for Children
-
Birmingham Children’s Trust
-
Bolton Metropolitan Borough Council
-
Calderdale Metropolitan Borough Council
-
London Borough of Wandsworth
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Northamptonshire Children’s Trust
To learn more about the work completed in Phase 1 including a detailed breakdown of the methodology, the key findings and recommendations, download the report.
Key benefits for participating Local Authorities
01
Access to a modelling tool to assess potential financial benefits of reductions in care proceedings duration, enabling local authorities to project and track cost implications and financial benefits
02
03
Diagnostic survey to identify potential root causes of delays and compare with other local authorities to aggregate data and create an understanding of the regional and national picture
Using a standardised approach to benchmark against peers and opportunities to disseminate good practice
05
Opportunity to contribute to the national dialogue between DfE, MoJ and the Judiciary about how can proceedings can be further improved
04
Access to high-quality and flexible analytical support from our team
06
Free financial modelling training for up to five government funded apprentices from every local authority
Phase 1: key findings & data
There is no simple, single cause of court delays. Factors contributing to delays are multiple, complex and varying from area to area. Family reasons (e.g. late presentation of relatives that can assume caring responsibilities) were the most common reason for the delays in the analysed sample of cases. This was followed by difficulties in fact finding, and use of external experts and additional assessments.
The findings from this report show that through the efficient use of resources and mature cross-system leadership, more money could be released to the wider system and spent on preventative services and pre-proceedings with an aim to divert cases from courts. Not only would reducing family court delays reduce financial costs across the system, it would also improve outcomes for vulnerable children.
£1.2bn
Total legal costs incurred by central and local
government to bring children into care
45 weeks
Average duration of public law family court
proceedings in 2021
£1,146
Estimated average impacts of reducing proceeding
duration by one week
£24m
Potential savings or cost efficiency
across all English
local authorities if all proceedings reduced by one week
National Steering Group
MV established a National Steering Group (NSG) to provide system-wide leadership and oversight of the work that MV was commissioned to conduct by the DfE. This group met three times during the project, receiving updates on the work, the overall plan for the work and emerging findings.
NSG Membership
Ana Popovici
Director of Children’s Services in Wandsworth
Ex Cafcass Associate Director
Chief Executive of Cafcass
Ade Adetosoye
Bromley Chief Executive and Solace spokesperson for Children & Families
Colin Foster
Northamptonshire Children's Trust Chief Executive
The Hon. Mr Justice Keehan
High Court Judge (Family Division)
Bernie Brown
Director of People Services in Bolton
Other members:
•Kathryn Butterworth, MoJ / HMCTS Courts and Tribunals Recovery Unit
•Lauren Kocan, Head of Children’s Rights and Family Justice, DfE
•Clare Chamberlain, Subject Matter Expert
•Emmet Regan, Chair
•David Fairhurst, Co-chair
