A registered manager search landed on my desk again this week, same as most weeks lately.
What's different this time is the client asking whether it'll take even longer than her last one did. Other care groups are still circling the same short list, same as always. But now there's a council in the mix too, and that changes the maths quite a bit.
Twenty-five social services authorities across England are being folded into 35 brand new unitary councils, part of the government's wider local government reorganisation.
It's a huge administrative shake-up on paper. But it has a very direct effect on anyone trying to hire a registered manager, a regional manager or an operations director over the next year or two. Almost nobody outside the sector seems to have joined those dots yet. A Community Care poll of 725 social care professionals, published this month, put some real numbers on that unease.
Only 7% think the smaller new councils will actually improve how care gets delivered. Just under half said reorganisation might work, but only with proper funding and experienced leadership already in place, and nearly as many rejected the plan outright.
And the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, the department actually running this reorganisation, has admitted something worth sitting with. Its own guidance expects the reforms to create "additional demand for senior leaders at a time when leadership pipelines are already under pressure". That isn't an outside critic's complaint. It's the department in charge saying the quiet part out loud.
The government isn't pretending this is a small problem either, at least not on paper.
It's putting up to £150,000 per new council toward transition management, and as much as £1.5 million into leadership development, mentoring and peer support for directors of adult social care. There's a fast-track development programme in the works too, built to get people into director-level roles faster than the normal route allows. Or at least that's the hope on paper.
Why does council reorganisation matter to a private care provider?
Because your registered managers, regional managers and area managers come from exactly the same experience pool the new councils will be fishing in. A newly formed unitary authority needs directors and senior managers from day one. It can offer public sector pensions most private providers can't match. Line up 35 councils hiring at once, and providers are left competing for whoever's left over.
And they'll be doing it with smaller budgets, thinner HR teams and no £150,000 transition fund behind them. The competition just got a lot less fair, and it happened almost overnight.
I had a call a few weeks back from an operations director running a small group of residential homes in the North West. She wanted to know, roughly, how long a decent regional manager search takes right now. The honest answer was longer than she wanted to hear. And that was before councils started actively recruiting for the same skill set with public money behind them.
We've already written about the registered manager shortage on its own terms, long before this reorganisation news landed, because it isn't new. What's new is a second buyer showing up in the same market with government funding to help it move fast.
What does a vacant leadership post actually cost a care provider?
More than most budgets account for. A care home without a registered manager in place is a care home carrying real regulatory risk, since CQC pays close attention to who's actually running the service day to day. Leave that post empty too long and it tends to show up at the next inspection, one way or another.
An interim can bridge the gap, but interim cover is expensive and rarely a long term answer.
It isn't the kind of continuity a service needs to hold its rating and keep families confident in the placement. Deputies get stretched thin covering a vacancy on top of their own role. Staff notice when leadership is missing. Turnover creeps up exactly when you need stability most, and the whole cycle starts feeding itself.
What should care providers do about a tightening leadership market?
Start succession planning now, not when someone hands in their notice. Get a proper read on what your regional and area managers are worth right now, because a below-market offer next to a council role with a public pension won't survive first contact. Look at who inside your organisation could step up from deputy to registered manager with the right support.
Don't assume you can always buy that experience in from outside. Retention matters more here than it did six months ago.
A manager who might have grumbled and stayed before now has a different offer sitting in their inbox. This is exactly the kind of moment where social care leadership recruitment specialists earn their fee. A generalist agency can eventually fill the role, but a council chasing the same shortlist with government funding behind it won't wait. And there's no reason for them to move fast on your account.
In my experience, a properly run registered manager search takes somewhere around eight to twelve weeks from brief to start date.
And that's before you add a council competing for the same names into the mix. Leave it until the vacancy is already live and you're starting from behind. If you're planning a registered manager, regional manager or operations director appointment in the next year, now's a sensible point to start that conversation. Get ahead of it before the new councils are fully staffed and actively hiring themselves.
Coburg Banks' specialist health and social care recruitment team works exclusively at that management level, across the country.
We'd honestly rather help you build a pipeline in advance than take the panicked call in six months' time. Get in touch and we'll talk through what your team actually needs, not just what fills a vacancy fastest. And if you're a registered or deputy manager weighing up your own next move, our current care leadership vacancies are worth a look too.
