No Order, No Certainty: What Section 20 Means for Children Living in Residential Homes

The Children Act 1989 created two distinct legal routes by which a child can become looked after. The first, and most widely understood, is the care order: a court-authorised intervention under Section 31 that transfers parental responsibility to the local authority and provides the child with a formal legal status that both defines and limits what can happen to them. The second is Section 20: a voluntary accommodation arrangement under which the local authority provides a home for a child whose parents or carers agree to the placement and retain full parental responsibility throughout. There is no court, no threshold finding, no judicial oversight. The local authority acts — and is only able to continue to act — on the basis of ongoing parental consent. A significant proportion of children currently living in children's residential homes are there under this arrangement. The implications of that legal status for care planning, for daily practice, and for the child's own experience of their situation are substantial, and they are less consistently understood across the residential sector than they should be.

The most immediate practical consequence of a Section 20 placement is that parental responsibility is never shared with the local authority. Parents retain the right to make decisions about their child's life — about education, about medical treatment, about contact, about religious upbringing — in exactly the same way they would if the child were living at home. More significantly, under Section 20(8) of the Act, a parent can remove their child from local authority accommodation at any time, simply by requesting it, without needing to give notice and without the local authority having any automatic power to prevent it. For a residential home, this means that a young person could — in principle — be removed by a parent at short notice, regardless of the home's assessment of risk or of the young person's own wishes. In practice, most local authorities would seek emergency protective measures in such circumstances if they believed a removal would put the child at risk. But the point is that the default position is different: the legal authority to keep a child in a placement rests on parental cooperation, not on a court's finding that it is necessary. Homes must understand whose authority they are operating under on any given day.

The misuse of Section 20 has been a documented concern in child protection policy for more than a decade, and it has not been resolved. The core problem is this: voluntary accommodation, which was designed for families going through a temporary crisis — bereavement, illness, a parent's hospitalisation — has been used routinely as a substitute for the care proceedings that a child's situation actually warrants. Children with extensive child protection histories, children who have been on child protection plans for years, children where concerns about significant harm are unambiguous, have been placed in residential homes under Section 20 rather than under care orders, with the practical effect that their legal situation remains permanently provisional. The authority to provide care is renewed, implicitly, each day that a parent does not demand removal. The child has no court-appointed advocate, no guardian, no judicial oversight of their care plan. The IRO's scrutiny function exists for all looked-after children regardless of legal status, but the absence of court oversight removes an important accountability layer. The Supreme Court, in cases including Northamptonshire County Council v AS [2015], found that some uses of Section 20 constituted unlawful deprivation of liberty. The sector has improved. The misuse has not ended.

For residential homes, the implications extend beyond the legal technicalities and into daily practice. The staff member who knows a young person is on a Section 20 arrangement needs to understand, concretely, what this means for their role. It means that written parental consent may be required for activities that would not require it under a care order. It means that parental contact cannot be restricted without legal authority that the home does not have independently. It means that if a parent arrives and demands to take their child, the home's response is not the same as it would be under a care order, and the emergency call is to the duty social worker and potentially to the police — not to an authority the home itself holds. It means that the care plan's objectives, including any goal of rehabilitation to the family home, operate within a framework of ongoing parental agreement rather than court-directed intention. None of this is exotic knowledge. All of it affects ordinary decisions that residential staff make and situations they may encounter. The registered manager of a home carrying Section 20 placements has a responsibility to ensure that staff understand the legal position of each young person in their care, not in abstract regulatory terms but in terms that are relevant to what might happen on a Tuesday afternoon.

The child's own experience of a Section 20 placement is a dimension of this that the sector has been slow to think clearly about. Young people in residential care already navigate significant uncertainty: about how long they will be there, about what the plan is, about whether the placement will last. A Section 20 arrangement adds a specific legal layer to that uncertainty. The placement exists, technically, on parental agreement — which means that a young person may understand, at some level, that their living situation could be disrupted by a parental decision in a way that would not be true under a care order. For young people whose relationship with their parents is fraught — where parental behaviour has contributed to the need for care in the first place — this creates a specific kind of insecurity that is not simply about the quality of the placement. It is about the conditions under which the placement exists at all. Homes do not always address this explicitly with young people, and perhaps they are right not to open that conversation without careful preparation and strong professional relationships in place. But the implication is that the social worker, the IRO, and the keyworker all need to be more rather than less attentive to a young person's sense of stability and legal position when a Section 20 arrangement is in place, because the scaffolding they are relying on is thinner.

Good practice under Section 20, where it is genuinely appropriate, requires the local authority to maintain active oversight of whether the legal status remains right for the child's situation. The test is not whether the placement is working — a Section 20 placement can be working very well while the child's legal situation remains inappropriately provisional. The test is whether the level of court oversight that the child's circumstances warrant is actually in place. Where a child has a Child in Need plan under Section 17 and is briefly accommodated during a family crisis, Section 20 may be exactly the right response. Where a child has been living in residential care for two years with no resolution of the family circumstances that led to their accommodation, no care proceedings have been initiated, and the parents remain nominally in agreement while exercising little actual parental responsibility, the legal arrangement has drifted well beyond its proper scope. Residential homes are not able to initiate care proceedings — that is the local authority's decision — but they are able, through the registered manager, to raise concerns about the appropriateness of a young person's legal status through the IRO and through formal advocacy with the placing authority. For some homes, this will feel like an unusual intrusion into the authority's territory. It should not. A home that is responsible for a young person's safety and development every day of the week has a legitimate interest in whether the legal framework governing that responsibility is adequate to the situation.