Published in Children Services on 28/04/2026
A podcast run by the Northwest Social Work Convention aired on the 2nd of April 2026, with the topic of sufficiency, commissioning, and better outcomes for children in social care. This episode includes a discussion with Lancashire County Council Children’s Services regarding their approach to sufficiency and commissioning that led them to win the gold award for the CareCubed category at the 2026 IESE Awards.
Reflections on Progress
With a focus on the goal of seeking more optimal outcomes in Lancashire, the podcast spoke to Louise Anderson (Director of Children’s Social Care) and Annette McNeil (Senior Manager for Policy, Commissioning and Children’s Health) about how this progress began and the core duties that surround commissioning efforts.
The drive for optimisation came at Louise’s arrival in Lancashire in 2022, after facing challenges around growing costs that were increasing month by month and were far from the picture of sustainability. With challenges around ensuring children have appropriate homes for their care needs, Lancashire County Council started a new project called ‘Working Together’, closely followed by the adoption and implementation of the CareCubed Cost of Care tool.
Adopting CareCubed
Lancashire pride themselves on being one of the first local authorities to adopt CareCubed, especially during a time when the provider market was the biggest challenge to mitigating sector struggles. Prior to Louise joining the Lancashire team, Annette describes the team’s use of the tool as ‘tinkering around the edges’.
“CareCubed is a national benchmarking tool that has been developed by an organisation called IESE. It’s been used in the adult space for quite a while, but they have developed a children’s tool,” stated Annette McNeil.
They at first used CareCubed to start understanding what it was that homes were delivering and how their costs were broken down. At the starting point of the tools’ use, while they had several people working on it, there was still a lack of confidence, and the team quickly acknowledged the need for an analyst who could use the tool and have the hard conversations with providers around cost benchmarking.
Annette’s colleague, Louise, started in November 2022 and came in with the notion of a need to understand the costs and what each home provided, and with CareCubed, the team had the tools to do this. However, Louise also assisted with embedding CareCubed, so that it was not just a tool used by commissioning teams or the analyst; instead, it became a critical part of the whole decision-making process and the sector awareness.
Embedding CareCubed
Louise embedded CareCubed into the process that the council followed to optimise their commissioning and home-finding process. They set the boundary that any home over £7,000 per week at the time would lead to a discussion about the whole picture, including a comprehensive overview of the child’s needs and what the home had in place that would meet these needs. Additionally, the team took into critical consideration what CareCubed relayed about the costs from the information on the child’s needs and the support of those needs. CareCubed would help them validate if the suggested costs were at or close to the benchmark for these needs and support for their local authority area.
When the CareCubed benchmark and the costings did not add up, Louise would encourage the commissioning teams to keep looking, encouraging a slower but more thorough process. A process that focused on ensuring that they got it right, and got it right the first time, with a right-sized home that was within the bounds of the CareCubed benchmark as a validation that this was what this care should cost.
The Outcomes of CareCubed Implementation
Lancashire County Council noted that while cost savings are a great outcome, there are also positive outcomes for the children in care.
Louise stated that, ‘We have found that children who are high risk or who are at risk to themselves or others, tend to turn corners as the social care team made stronger decisions.’ Upon reviewing high-cost children’s home placements, Louise stated there has been evidence of progress. Children in these settings who may not have attended education for years are now able to show regular engagement with education since the changes made by the team around decision-making processes.
Reviewing the impact on the ground also showed a difference in extreme behaviours, calming down and with ‘settled periods’ of up to a month for children who used to be unsettled 24 hours a day. Showing the quality that having the CareCubed benchmark and data-driven costing analysis can help to drive commissioning decisions that have a substantial benefit for the child in the long term, as well as benefits for the local authority and their provider relationships.
To find out more about CareCubed Cost of Care, and what the tool can do to benchmark and evidence the cost of care, contact CareCubed to book a demo.
