What mechanisms exist to intervene where local authorities continue to produce poor outcomes for care-experienced young people despite their corporate parenting responsibilities?
The Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014 is centred on well-being outcomes, and the annual National Outcomes Framework Report provides a national picture of progress in relation to those outcomes for people who need care and support and unpaid carers who receive support. The Social services national outcomes framework: annual report 2025 -reports on the outcomes achieved by local authorities against the well-being indicators relevant to care leavers, including participation in employment, education or training during the reporting year.
Local authorities are accountable for the delivery of their social services functions under the Social Services Well-being Act (Wales) 2014, including meeting their statutory duties to looked after children and care leavers, applying the principles of corporate parenting. Care Inspectorate Wales reviews and inspects local authority children’s and adult social services and reports on the effectiveness of those services. Care Inspectorate Wales (CIW) approach is designed to identify strengths, risks, emerging concerns and opportunities for improvement.
Where CIW identifies significant service failures or serious, systemic concerns that present risks to people's safety and well-being, a local authority service may be designated as requiring significant improvement. In these circumstances, CIW implements an enhanced oversight and improvement process, including an Improvement Conference and enhanced monitoring arrangements. This may involve targeted inspection or assurance activity, increased engagement with senior leaders, improvement checks, and information sharing with Welsh Government and inspection partners. The purpose of this approach is to secure timely and sustainable improvement, provide assurance that risks are being addressed, and support the local authority to improve outcomes for people who need care and support. Services remain subject to enhanced monitoring until CIW has sufficient evidence that the required improvements have been achieved and sustained, at which point they return to routine performance review arrangements.
Part 8 of the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014 also provides Welsh Ministers with powers to intervene in the exercise of local authority social services functions, including powers to issue warning notices, require advisory support, direct how functions are exercised, or require functions to be carried out by another person or by Welsh Ministers or their nominee.
These arrangements provide a framework for monitoring performance, identifying poor outcomes and taking action where improvement is required.
Alongside these formal arrangements, the Welsh Government continues to work with local authorities and the wider sector to drive improvements for care leavers across Wales. This has been done through transformation programmes for children’s services, which worked directly with care-experienced children and young people, and the Radical Reform Summits. In addition, we have re-established the Leaving Care Forum to work directly with local authority practitioners on policy development and implementation moving forward.