Stockport Council strengthened its adult social care governance to improve financial oversight and accountability. The council introduced new risk management protocols, embedded monthly assurance reporting, clarified leadership responsibilities and deepened collaboration between operational and finance teams. These changes led to improved performance monitoring, greater consistency in decision making and a more confident and engaged workforce. The new approach has helped create a culture of shared ownership, earlier problem solving and more effective use of resources.
Rising demand, inflationary pressures and workforce shortages mean adult social care is under acute financial strain. Councils must make difficult decisions to meet statutory duties, support vulnerable residents and deliver savings within constrained budgets.
In this environment, strong financial governance is essential. It underpins sustainability, ensures accountability and enables better decision making. The most resilient systems are those where finance, performance and operational practice are fully joined up, and where frontline teams understand how their actions drive both outcomes and value.
Keywords
Governance, assurance, oversight, risk management, accountability, transparency, positive learning culture, shared ownership.
The challenge
Stockport Council, like other local authorities in the UK, has faced numerous challenges in recent years, including austerity measures, Brexit uncertainties, the global pandemic, rising energy costs and the cost of living crisis.
‘One Stockport: One Future’ is the next phase of our borough plan. It sets out how we will work together to tackle the challenges set out above, so Stockport can be the best place to live happy and healthy lives – a place where anything is possible, a place that everyone right across the borough can be proud of. The council priorities show how we will contribute to the borough plan – how we will deliver for those who need it most and to have safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led adult social care services, putting people at the heart of what we do while delivering change and spending our money wisely.
In 2024/25, the cost of delivering council services in Stockport increased, evidenced by the greater than planned £10.4m additional spend on services. The council’s costs continue to grow due to demographics and inflation, including changes to National Insurance and increases to the national/real living wage. As part of the council’s 2025/26 revenue budget-setting report, £8.9m of change proposals have been approved, which includes £4.6m for adult social care.
These pressures and change proposals have made it increasingly difficult to balance the need to make significant savings while continuing to meet the rising demand for services, support an ageing demographic and deliver on statutory duties as they relate to adult social care, all without compromising quality of experience for residents and ensuring best value outcomes.
To manage these risks, good governance is therefore critical to ensure effective use of available resources, sustainable delivery of adult social care and a high-quality experience for Stockport residents, both now and in the future. While the council already has a robust medium-term financial planning process in place, with regular operational and financial performance monitoring through portfolio performance resources agreements and reports, the rising and sustained pressures on the adult social care operating environment have necessitated improvements in governance arrangements at the directorate level over the past 12 months. This effort has gone beyond policies and procedures and involved a systematic review of our governance practices. The result is a refreshed approach that ensures good governance is not only embedded but fully understood with shared ownership. This shared understanding now fosters a sense of ownership and pride among all stakeholders.
The action
Recognising that pressures and risks can emerge in any part of the system, we developed Adult Social Care Operational Pressures, Risk and Escalation Protocols. These bring together all triggers, risks and escalation procedures into one place, including monitoring and mitigation activities. All leaders have a role in delivering these functions, identifying and addressing risk within their service areas accordingly. We communicated the protocols to all leaders in adult social care and embedded the escalation protocols within monthly assurance reporting.
We have monthly adult social care senior management team (SMT) meetings dedicated respectively to quality assurance and performance and finance. They ensure oversight of quality and decision making, drive improvements, monitor budgetary spend and set strategic direction through the lens of the experience of people, carers and our workforce. Heads of service prepare a monthly assurance report and present these to the SMT. The reports cover all areas of operations and commissioning and demonstrate oversight, assurance and accountability. They also include our escalation protocols around management of pressure and risk.
We have a layered approach to risk management within the council, with services being responsible for maintaining and managing their risks at head of service/SMT level. Risks that may require escalation and oversight at a corporate level are raised with the council’s risk manager for inclusion on the corporate risk register. SMT meet with the risk manager quarterly to review the adult social care-related elements on the corporate risk register before this is reported to the corporate leadership team and the council’s audit committee.
We have developed a leadership SharePoint site, which includes all key areas of leadership inclusive of governance, performance, oversight and risk, with an easy-to-use front end to support leaders in accessing data, tools, procedures and best practice with ease.
At the operational level, we have introduced a peer review and quality assurance group to support practice decision making and ensure budgetary oversight, providing assurance of appropriate use of resources and to ensure best-value outcomes. Colleagues from management accountancy support the quality assurance group. We have also enhanced our assurance activities and processes and relaunched our quality assurance framework. We now employ two quality assurance officers to oversee delivery of this across the service.
Delivery of changes, learning and innovation is via our quality assurance delivery group, which meets monthly and has representatives from across adult social care and the wider council. Through this forum and business partnering approaches with the corporate centre, we have robust arrangements in place to make changes and improvements from within.
The outcome
Complementing the existing corporate governance and risk arrangements in adult social care, we also have the following:
- Clearer accountability and oversight at all levels of leadership, with leaders acknowledging clearer roles and responsibilities.
- Regular assurance reporting that is open and transparent and invites high support and high challenge from peers, celebrating strengths and identifying areas for improvement using data and evidence from multiple sources. When we first launched assurance reporting, we only received reports from 50% of the service (operations and commissioning) – we now have these monthly, consistently, for 100% of the service.
- Greater understanding of how different pressures impact across the service, leading to improved relations, greater cross-service working and joint problem solving.
- More opportunities to learn from what is working well and sharing best practice through our quality assurance practices. We now have over 20 individual Stockport stories, sharing the impact of good practice leading to great outcomes for people.
- Greater triangulation of data and information, in particular linking thinking across the operational model, performance and quality and budgetary impact. An example is a practice development area noted as a consistent theme through the quality assurance group, which led to the identification of inconsistent practice impacting people and requiring immediate review and redress. The response was mandatory training delivered to all frontline teams, a new guidance document and increased monitoring of decision making and practice in this area.
- Oversight of decision making in practice, which supports the effective and creative use of resources and is driving improvements in practice quality and decision making. An example is the reduction in short-term placements made over time linked to oversight of decision-making and alternative provisions being sourced (see short-term placements table in evidence section below).
- Reframed governance and assurance to be received more positively in the context of a learning culture.
- Greater involvement from our frontline workforce in driving improvements collaboratively across the service. The quality assurance delivery group – our main forum for driving change and improvement – is now attended by ten-plus frontline operational practitioners/managers compared with two when we first launched it. We continue to promote the benefit of attending this forum.
- Opportunity to review our current performance measures using a performance evidence base and greater opportunities to improve and share learning around monitoring performance using data tools.
Reflection
Key lessons learned include the following:
- We had governance and performance monitoring already in place, but necessary improvements included making some of this more overt, more routine and more systematic.
- Not taking for granted that everyone is clear about what constitutes good governance and assurance. This was an opportunity to revisit what good looks like and why good governance is important. Refreshing our language around governance within the context of ensuring sustainability and improving services for the people we serve has given rise to shared goals and collaborative working.
- Oversight of decision making has led to opportunities to be more focused and targeted with development opportunities.
- Being more transparent and explicit about roles and responsibilities is advantageous for all and promotes greater respect and understanding between colleagues.
- We have seen people grow in confidence in describing their service successes and challenges using evidence as a result of changes we have made in relation to governance and assurance.
- With assurance comes professional pride – people are proud to talk about improved performance and more open to share challenges much earlier. Developing the right learning culture is important.
- Not taking for granted the importance of good processes and clear, articulated systems of governance and assurance.
7 July 2025
Contact information
Sam Powell
Lead for Strategy Development, Quality Assurance and Performance (Adult Social Care)
samantha.powell@stockport.gov.uk
Paul Graham
Strategic Financial Advisor (Adult Social Care and Health)
paul.graham@stockport.gov.uk
