More Time for What Matters: What Local Authority Teams Told Us

Every person we spoke to described a version of the same problem. The work that matters: the assessment, the conversation, the decision, the intervention: is being crowded out by the work that surrounds it. Not because people are inefficient. Because the systems they work in were not designed for the volume, the complexity, or the pace of what local authority teams are managing in 2026.

Local government reorganisation is consuming leadership bandwidth at exactly the moment when authorities need it most. Whether an authority is merging, absorbing, or being absorbed, the decisions about what that means for services are landing on desks that are already full. Directors described spending significant portions of their week on structural questions that have no clear resolution date, while the operational pressures of adult social care, children's services, and commissioning continue without pause.

CQC baseline assessments are rolling out across adult social care. The evidence needed to demonstrate how statutory duties are being met has to come from somewhere. For most authorities, that means someone has to find it, assemble it from multiple systems, and make it legible for an inspection framework that is still being interpreted in real time. That is not a small task. It is landing on people who are already at capacity.

Vacancy rates in adult social care have fallen to their lowest level in a decade. That is the headline. The number underneath it is harder.

Of care workers who are considering leaving the sector, 67% cite the impact of their job on their health and wellbeing as a primary reason. The people who stayed are not staying because the work got easier. They are staying despite it.

Social workers we spoke to described a working week where the ratio of time spent on administration to time spent with people has not improved. The 65% administration, 35% care split that has been cited in sector research for years is not a historical artefact. It is a current reality. Case recording happens after the visit, from memory, because the system does not allow it at the point of care. Reviews are completed in the gaps between other things. The work that requires professional judgement gets done in the time left over from the work that requires a form to be filled in.

Commissioners described a version of the same problem at a different level. Decisions about service design, provider capacity, and market development are being made on information that is days or weeks old, assembled from systems that do not talk to each other. The data exists. Getting to it takes time that should be spent acting on it.

The pressures described above are real and they are not going away. The funding settlement is what it is. The demand curve is not changing direction. LGR will take as long as it takes.

But the administration burden is not fixed. It is a product of how systems are designed and how they connect to each other. And unlike the funding settlement, it is something that sits within an authority's control.

The authorities that have made the most progress on this are not the ones with the largest transformation budgets. They are the ones that have been specific about where the time is going and deliberate about changing it. Derbyshire's brokerage team reduced referral to care in place from three days to two, not by adding resource, but by connecting the commissioning pathway so that the assembly work happened in the system rather than on a spreadsheet. The time that was freed up went back to the people doing the work.

That is what more time for what matters looks like in practice. Not a transformation programme. A specific change to a specific process, with a measurable outcome.

Over the next quarter, we will be sharing what we have learned from local authority teams about where the time is going and what is changing it. The TechUK white paper on digital adult social care transformation sets out the policy context. The Derbyshire case study sets out what one authority did and what it produced. And we will be sharing the workforce argument in more detail, because the connection between administration burden and staff retention is more direct than most workforce strategies acknowledge.

Access Group works with more than 200 local authorities across adult social care, children's services, commissioning, and TEC. This piece draws on conversations with local authority teams conducted between January and June 2026.

If any of this is live for your team right now, we would welcome the conversation. Get in touch now.