Residential Care: Work Begins To Redraft National Contract Before September

A Government-funded group is reworking a contract that will transform the way local authorities deal with residential children’s homes when it launches in September.

The National Centre for Excellence in Residential Child Care (NCERCC) is also developing a monitoring framework during the next three months and will set up an implementation and monitoring group, which will include representatives of care homes and commissioners.

The group will monitor the implementation of the first year of the England-only contract, which will be used by local authorities when commissioning placements in the private and voluntary sectors. It will carry out a review of the contract in September 2008.

The redraft comes after the NCERCC working group, which drafted the contract, met earlier this month to discuss feedback on its consultation, which took place between February and April.

The consultation raised concerns about what would happen when contracts with individual homes needed to be terminated, as well as price and insurance clauses, but there was positive feedback on the consistency of the contract, its role in promoting good quality and outcomes, the potential for fewer fee disputes and for a reduction in administration.

Jonathan Stanley, acting director of the NCERCC, said: “The ease of use was foremost in the mind of the working group. The work of the development group should be completed in June and there should be an opportunity for further consultation with commissioners and providers.”

Sika Smith, a member of the working group and commissioning and placement service manager at Northamptonshire County Council, said: “The challenge is how detailed we make the contract and how to reduce it in size and complexity without losing the balance of it.”

Work has also been under way to relaunch the three-year-old National Contract for Placement in Non-Maintained and Independent Day and Residential Schools.