Children’s services must see LGR as an opportunity to put prevention first and join up services around families

Local Government Reorganisation can be a catalyst for a more preventative, integrated, humane system says John Copps.

For busy council officers – facing challenges day-to-day and relentless scrutiny from regulators – is easy to look at local government reorganisation as a distraction.

But LGR is more than an exercise in administrative tidying-up. It is a chance for real reform. With 21 ‘two-tier’ areas due to break up into new unitary councils, the map of children’s services will be redrawn over the coming years.

The stakes are high. We all know the challenges: many more children in care than there should be, help for families that comes too late, services that don’t work well enough together, and an ever-present sense of financial crisis.

There is nothing intrinsic to LGR that will change that. But handled well, it provides a chance to shake things up and create the conditions for early help for children, stronger relationships with families, and services that genuinely work together. It can augment the reforms already underway around family help, multi-agency child protection, family group decision-making and fostering.

Putting children and families at the centre of LGR

Children’s services must be top of the list for every new unitary council. As David Sidaway, Chief Executive of Telford & Wrekin, argues, it should be the ‘number one priority’, and describes corporate parenting as is the council’s ‘most important duty’. For colleagues from district councils, in particular, the learning curve will be steep.

New councils will rightly focus on being ‘safe and legal’ from day one. Critical though that is, it would be a mistake to stop there.

LGR gives leaders the chance to start afresh: by setting clear ambitions for children and families, renewing relationships with partners, and designing services around the lived experience of children and families.

The work of Leeds Relational Practice Centre has shown us how a commitment to children and families must be infused throughout the make-up of a place, making ‘child friendly’ a goal across public services and the local economy, and thinking in terms of ‘services for children’ rather than just children’s services.

Culture more than structure

For all the talk of new boundaries, budgets and staffing structures, it will be the culture that goes alongside it that determines how success LGR is. New reporting lines and governance charts will achieve little if relationships and behaviours remain the same.

Culture change must be driven by strong and determined leadership and vision that puts families first. It means supporting and trusting practitioners and nurturing relationships within new councils and their partners in the NHS, police, housing and the voluntary sector.

But leadership is not only about directors and managers in children’s services. Everyone in a council can and should set an example and commit to building this shared culture. Leadership must also come from the wider system, including all local partners. Smaller unitary councils, for example, can use their closeness to neighbourhoods to strengthen relationships and join up support across organisational boundaries.

How LGR is managed should also paid heed to wider structural reforms. As well as removing two tier local government, the government has set in motion the creation new Mayor-led strategic authorities, and is consolidating local NHS Integrated Care Boards. Within children’s services, there is growth in regional working, in the form of fostering recruitment hubs and Regional Care Cooperatives. Closer collaboration across boundaries is the order of the day.

The opportunity is clear: LGR can be a catalyst for a more preventative, integrated, humane system, that keeps families together and gives children the chance to thrive. And so, as councils prepare for the decisions ahead, the question is not just how to redraw the map, it is how to redraw the future for children.

Watch this space for upcoming webinars and articles on LGR and children’s services.

Read our report ‘Children's Services and Local Government Reorganisation (LGR): Key Considerations’ published in 2025.

For more information on our work in LGR contact John Copps john@mutualventures.co.uk.