The Management of External Residential Placements

In this final chapter reporting the findings of our study we turn to the question of how SSDs manage relationships with external providers of children’s residential care. Over the past decade the role of the independent sector in this area care has increased dramatically. This change is demonstrated most clearly in statistics revealing a sharp decline in the share of local authority run provision in England. Between 1993/94 and 1996/97, the proportion of ‘own provision’ fell from 63 per cent to only 53 per cent (CIPFA 1997). Many authorities, even those with large in-house resources, now rely heavily on independent sector provision. The trend has been especially marked in the new unitary authorities, many of which are now too small to provide for all their residential care needs locally (SFCRC 1996: 28).