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Costs of regulating residential care services for children. Funded/commissioned by: Department of Health and Welsh Office

Abstract

There are a number of important planned changes in the way that the regulatory function is to be conducted in Englandand Wales in the future (Department of Health, 1998). These include the setting up of independent regional authoritiesresponsible for regulating care services, the extension of regulatory requirements to services not currently covered byregulatory legislation and the setting of standards at a national level. An important issue to consider in this context is thesetting of fees to those who are being regulated. A key recommendation of the Burgner report on regulation and inspectionof social services was that the cost of regulation should be independently reviewed with a view to relating fee levels moreclosely to the actual costs of regulation (Burgner, 1996; p8). This report describes the results of an extension to a Department of Health and Wales Office funded study of health andlocal authority inspection units in England which had investigated the costs of regulating care homes for adults (Netten,Forder and Knight, 1999a). The principal aim of this study was to establish the costs of regulating residential care servicesfor children, in a way that could be used to identify cost-based fees to establishments. Residential care services forchildren were taken to include residential homes, family centres, boarding schools, foster care agencies, and adoptionagencies. Of these services Units currently have statutory responsibility for inspecting homes registered under the Children’s Act1989 and independent boarding schools. The Social Services Inspectorates of the Department of Health and Wales Officeinspect voluntary homes and voluntary adoption agencies. There are no statutory requirements to regulate the otherservices. Under the Children Act 1989 local authorities have the power to charge a “reasonable” fee for registration andinspection of private children’s homes, but voluntary homes, local authority homes and boarding schools do not pay fees. The main data collection was a survey of local authority and joint inspection units undertaken during the autumn of 1999.The data collection built on data collected in the previous survey (Netten, Forder and Knight, 1999a). For this studysupplementary data were collected about unit policies and practice with respect to services for which they had no statutoryresponsibilities, children’s services’ inspector characteristics and a sample week’s time use; and a sample of recentlyundertaken inspections and registrations. Information was also collected about enforcement actions undertaken during theprevious year. SSI inspectors involved also provided equivalent information on the amount of time spent on inspecting andregistering voluntary homes

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