Delegated Authority: Who Can Actually Say Yes for a Child in Care?

A young person in residential care asks if they can go on a school trip to an adventure centre next Friday. In most families, this question takes thirty seconds to resolve. In a children's home, it can take a week of phone calls, trigger a request to a placing authority that has a five-day response time, and ultimately land with a harassed social worker who has never visited the home and has to make a judgment call about a young person they know primarily through a case file. This is not a marginal scenario. It is the daily texture of life in residential care, and it costs young people access to ordinary experiences that their peers take entirely for granted. Understanding why it happens — and what can be done to make it less obstructive without compromising the safeguarding intent behind it — is one of the practical foundations of good residential practice.

The legal basis for the problem lies in the structure of parental responsibility. When a child comes into local authority care under a care order made under section 31 of the Children Act 1989, the local authority acquires parental responsibility alongside — not instead of — the birth parents. The local authority then delegates the day-to-day exercise of that responsibility to the registered provider of the placement: in a children's home, to the home itself, acting through its registered manager and staff. This delegation is formalised through the care plan and placement plan, and its scope is described — or should be described — in the placement information record. Guidance from the Department for Education, consolidated and strengthened in the 2013 statutory guidance on delegated authority and subsequently in the Children's Homes Regulations 2015 and accompanying quality standards, sets out the principle that looked-after children should be able to participate in the same activities as other children, and that the local authority should delegate sufficient authority to carers and homes to make that participation possible in practice. The principle is sound. The implementation is frequently not.

What delegated authority actually covers in daily life is a wider range of decisions than most residential workers — and many placing authorities — fully appreciate. Medical consent for non-urgent treatment is the most discussed: who can consent to a vaccination, a dental procedure, a prescription for a new medication, an assessment by a community paediatrician. But the framework extends well beyond health. It covers consent to participate in recreational activities — swimming, outdoor adventure, contact sports. It covers overnight stays with friends. It covers decisions about a young person's appearance: haircuts, ear piercings for older teenagers, hair dye. It covers participation in religious practices different from those described in the care plan. It covers travel — day trips, domestic breaks, and, most contentiously, travel abroad. For each of these categories, the question of whether the home has the authority to say yes — or must obtain it from the placing authority, the birth parent with parental responsibility, or the court — is not always clear, and the consequences of getting it wrong in either direction are real. A home that says yes when it should have sought authority may face regulatory challenge. A home that reflexively says no, or that delays decisions until authority can be confirmed, may deny a young person an experience that matters to them enormously.

The tension that runs through all of this is between risk management and ordinary life. The framework of delegated authority was designed precisely to prevent the paralysis that results when every decision must travel up a bureaucratic chain before it can be made. But in practice, risk-aversion often wins. Homes that are uncertain about the scope of their authority tend to err toward restriction, because restriction is defensible in a way that a bad outcome following permission is not. This logic is understandable, but its cost is borne by the young person, not by the system that produced it. A sixteen-year-old who cannot go to a friend's birthday party because no one can reach their social worker in time, or who cannot have their ears pierced on their birthday because the care plan was written when they were twelve and has never been updated to reflect their wishes, is a young person whose care is being experienced as a series of prohibitions rather than a framework of support. The accumulated effect of those prohibitions — across every small decision over months and years — shapes how a young person understands their own status and agency. It tells them, quietly and repeatedly, that they are different in a way that is managed rather than understood.

Good practice begins with clarity at the point of placement. A well-written placement information record specifies, in operational terms, which categories of decision the home has authority to make without referral, which require notification to the placing authority after the event, and which require prior approval. This is not a theoretical exercise: it should be drafted in a way that a residential support worker can use on a Tuesday evening when a young person asks about the weekend. Vagueness at this stage costs everyone later. Beyond the document, the relationship between the home and the allocated social worker matters enormously. A social worker who visits regularly, knows the young person, and can be reached and trusted to give a timely response is a partner in decisions rather than a bottleneck. Homes that invest in that relationship — that communicate proactively, that flag the anticipated decisions in advance rather than asking in a crisis — tend to find that delegated authority becomes a working reality rather than an aspiration in a policy folder. And when a request for permission is made and a decision is needed urgently, the home that has already built the relationship is far more likely to get a same-day response than the one that appears in a social worker's inbox as an unknown number attached to an unfamiliar name.

The young person's own voice belongs at the centre of this. Delegated authority is, ultimately, about the right of a looked-after child to participate in ordinary life — and ordinary life, for an adolescent, increasingly involves making their own choices. Good residential homes use the framework of delegated authority not just as a procedural question but as an opportunity to develop a young person's understanding of their own rights and entitlements. A young person who knows what they are entitled to ask for, who understands the difference between decisions that are theirs to make and those that require adult sign-off, and who has experienced adults around them advocating clearly for their right to participate in everyday activities, is a young person developing the self-advocacy skills they will need long after they have left care. The goal is not just to get permission for this trip or that piercing — it is to demonstrate, through the accumulated experience of adults who treat their wishes as worth working to fulfil, that they are someone whose preferences matter and who deserves to live an ordinary life.