Wales Sets New Rules for Annual Sufficiency Plans

From 26 October 2026, every local authority in Wales will face a more exacting test of how it plans for looked after children. The Local Authorities (Annual Sufficiency Plans) (Wales) Regulations 2026, published as a Welsh Statutory Instrument and signed by Deputy Minister Delyth Jewell on 14 September 2026, set the rules for what councils must publish before each financial year. That may sound dry, but the issue is not. When the law talks about “sufficiency”, it is really asking a human question: can a child who needs care be found the right home, in the right place, with the right support, at the right time?

The new rules sit behind a duty that already exists in the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014. Councils must secure, so far as reasonably practicable, enough accommodation for looked after children within or near their areas. Section 75A, added by the Health and Social Care (Wales) Act 2025, brought in the duty to prepare annual plans. These 2026 regulations fill in the detail. If you are new to the term, an annual sufficiency plan is basically a public plan produced before each financial year. It sets out the steps a council will take that year to make sure enough suitable accommodation is available for looked after children. What this means is simple: local authorities will now have to show their workings, using a template that Welsh Ministers must publish on the Welsh Government website.

One of the strongest parts of the regulation is that it starts with children’s needs, not just bed numbers. Each plan must include a written, evidence-based summary of the needs profile of looked after children in the area as at 30 September in the previous year. That includes age, language, protected characteristics under equality law, the reasons children entered care, placement needs, social and cultural needs, relationships, and the pressures facing older teenagers as they move towards adulthood. The wording published on legislation.gov.uk also says councils must explain how they engaged with children and young people to understand their wishes and feelings. That matters. A placement can look available on paper and still be wrong for a child if it cuts them off from siblings, school, culture, Welsh language support, or the education and health input needed for a complex care package.

After that, the regulations move into numbers, and the numbers are detailed for a reason. Councils must report how many children they looked after at different points in time, how many children they were unable to make arrangements for under section 81(2), and where those children were placed: in children’s homes, with local authority foster carers, or in secure accommodation. They must also sort that information by provider type, separating council provision, not-for-profit provision and a third category covering providers that are neither. You can also see the law trying to track distance. “Out of county” means outside the child’s own local authority area. “Out of country” does not mean outside the UK here; in this Welsh regulation it means outside Wales. Councils must publish figures for both, covering the second preceding year, the current year up to 30 September, forecasts for the rest of that year and forecasts for the plan year ahead. This is not a snapshot. It is a running picture of pressure and demand.

Some of the required figures are especially telling. Councils must say how many children were placed in services operating without registration, meaning places where a children’s home service or secure accommodation service was being provided without registration for that site. They must also report how many looked after children were subject to deprivation of liberty orders. The regulations do not give you an editorial verdict, but the choice of data points speaks loudly. When a government asks every council to count unregistered provision and deprivation of liberty orders, it is recognising that these are not fringe issues. They are warning signs in a system where safe, suitable local placements are not always easy to find.

The plans must also explain what provision is actually available locally, regionally and nationally, and what councils think will happen next. That includes forecasts for future numbers of looked after children, future out-of-county and out-of-Wales placements, future use of unregistered settings and future deprivation of liberty orders. Councils must also be frank about current data limits, explain how they will improve data quality during the plan year, and set out the biggest current and future risks to sufficiency, along with the steps they are taking to reduce those risks. This is where the regulation becomes more than a spreadsheet exercise. Councils are asked to name the pressures that could frustrate their plans, including provider market conditions, regional co-operation and funding. If a local authority thinks it may still struggle even with good planning, the public record should now show why.

Workforce is another major theme, and rightly so. The regulation asks for current workforce strategies and future workforce plans, covering capacity, capability, recruitment and retention in services for looked after children. Councils must address where they are most at risk, whether they have enough staff with the right skills, whether they can fill Welsh-speaking and specialist roles, how far they depend on agency staff, and what they will do on training and career development. That gives you a clearer view of a truth social care workers already know: care shortages are not only about buildings or placements. They are also about people. A council may want more local provision, but without enough foster carers, residential staff, social workers and specialist practitioners, the plan can stay on paper.

There is one technical safeguard worth noticing. Regulation 5 says information supplied to meet these duties cannot be used in evidence against an individual in criminal proceedings. In plain English, that is there to protect people involved in gathering and submitting the information from self-incrimination, not to water down the reporting duty itself. Each plan must also show how it fits with other relevant strategies and how the authority intends to meet its legal duty under section 75(1) of the 2014 Act. Taken together, the new Welsh rules are a push for transparency, but they are also an honest glimpse into where the care system is stretched. If you read the first round of annual sufficiency plans carefully, look for the gaps as much as the promises: children moved far from home, reliance on unregistered settings, staffing weaknesses, weak data, and the mismatch between what children need and what the market offers. Plans can expose problems more clearly. They cannot fix them on their own.