What Newton was contracted to do: the Families First contract explained

Newton Consulting Ltd's contract with Bristol City Council was worth £7,198,523. Its job was to help the council cut children's social care costs by at least £11m. The contract's specification (Call-Off Schedule 20) sets out the programme in detail. It says much less about what Newton itself had to deliver.

You can read the contract as the council released it (PDF, 110 pages). The redactions are in Schedule 5.

The contract in brief

Newton also billed £475,000 for mobilisation work from January to April 2025. That went through a separate supplier, Constellia, and sits outside this contract.

What the programme was meant to achieve

Six delivery projects each had a monthly target and a share of the £11m (paras 1.9, 1.11 and 1.14).

There was also an Early Help pilot, plus three supporting workstreams: benefits tracking, system visibility, and culture and practice.

The contract calls the monthly targets "illustrative". It says the £11m total is "the key measure of financial performance". Together these form the "Programme Objectives" (para 1.16).

The £11m is the target in Newton's contract, used to judge its performance. The council's wider target for Families First is £65m over five years (business case addendum, para 6.5). Of that, £47.5m falls in the three years after Newton's contract ended.

How each project was meant to save money

Each KPI movement is turned into money using placement costs. A child who stays at home avoids a care placement. A child who moves from a residential home to foster care saves the difference in weekly cost. The conversion rates are not published. EY's review in May 2025 found the money value of each individual action had not been worked out.

No project reports its headline KPI against its target.

Some figures don't reconcile:

• A separate one-off saving of £3.3m (2025/26) and £2.2m (2026/27) came from stepping down 20 children between June and December 2025 (addendum, para 6.4). It is "in addition to" Coming Home. The papers don't say whether these 20 are among the 37.
• Three older council projects were folded in: Mockingbird (£133k) into Stability, and fostering adaptations (£159k) and carer recruitment (£614k) into Fostering. The addendum says Newton should "assume responsibility for their delivery and benefits".
• The 2026/27 savings table lists carer recruitment (£284k) and fostering invest-to-save (£159k) as separate lines again. They may be counted twice.
• The slides report £6.6m and £6.7m saved against the £6.0m target for 2025/26. The update says about £700,000 over target. Yet the 2026/27 table carries forward £2.521m labelled "Over-delivery of Families First".

Do the moves last?

Suppose a child moves from a residential home to a foster family in September, and the placement breaks down in December. The child goes back to a residential home. The September move still counts as a step-down. The Coming Home KPI counts children who "have left residential care" each month. Nothing in its definition asks whether they stayed out.

The December return would show up elsewhere, as an escalation in the Stability project. Whether the saving claimed in September is then taken back is in the redacted benefits method (Sch 5, paras 4.4–4.5).

The same gap exists for Permanence. It counts children leaving care through reunification or special guardianship each month. If a reunification breaks down and the child comes back into care, that return is a new care start under Valuing Families. The papers don't say whether the original permanence saving is reversed.

Most step-downs go to foster care or supported accommodation. Reunification with birth family and special guardianship sit under Permanence.

National research shows these breakdowns do happen. A Department for Education study, Family Routes (Selwyn and Gardiner, September 2025), found that 10% of special guardianship orders and 2% of adoptions broke down within eight years. For every 100 special guardianship orders, about 5 children were back in care within five years.

Two findings matter for Families First. Orders made quickly carried more risk: 44% of special guardianship breakdowns involved children who left care within a year of entering it. And breakdowns came late. On average, children returned to care about four years after a special guardianship order and six years after an adoption. A saving counted in the month an order is made could reverse years after Newton's contract ended.

None of the committee papers reports how many moves have lasted. The Transformation Update mentions "sustainability tools" and "unexpected spikes in escalations", but gives no figures. Questions to ask:

• Of the children stepped down from residential care since February 2025, how many have returned to residential care within six and twelve months?
• Of the children reunified or placed under special guardianship, how many have come back into care within twelve months?
• When a move breaks down, is the saving already counted reversed in the benefits register and in the Fee Guarantee calculation?
• Were the 20 children in the one-off step-down cohort still in their new placements on 31 March 2026?

What Newton had to do

Newton's firm duties are about staffing and process. No reports, models or training are named as deliverables.

• Provide "a team of high-quality, skilled Consultants" (para 5.4.1). No team size is given.
• Work on site and remotely. Staff spend about two days a month off site, "typically… every other Friday" (para 5.4.3).
• Name a lead (Luke Tregidgo, Director), a Programme Manager and an owner for each workstream (paras 5.1–5.3).
• Support governance in line with its ISO 9001 quality processes (para 6.1).
• Meet social value commitments and report on them monthly (para 2.2).
• Help produce an exit and transition plan, due by 31 March 2026 (para 8.3).
• Run "health checks" every three to four months for up to a year after support ends. Each produces a summary report (paras 8.4–8.6).

Other commitments are softer. Newton "will endeavour" to find extra one-off savings "to help close the Buyer's budget gap" (para 1.15). The programme "aims" to reach £11m.

Para 6.8 says Newton's services "are advisory in nature". Final responsibility for every decision rests with the council.

What the council had to do

The council's duties are more specific than Newton's. It had to give access to all operational and financial data, staff and buildings, and act on risks raised (para 4.2). It also had to supply these staff (para 5.5.1):

This matters for the payment-by-results clause. Newton's Fee Guarantee depends on the council providing the resources in paras 4 and 5 of Schedule 20 (Schedule 5, para 5.1.1). If the council falls short, Newton can declare a "Dependency Failure" and the guarantee stops applying to that extent (Schedule 5, para 5.3.1).

Why hire consultants?

The council's stated reason is that its own change work had not delivered. Demand and costs were rising "at a faster rate than the ability of CFS to respond" (Sch 20, para 1.4). The previous programme had secured £3.061m of its £6.902m target by period 10 of 2024/25. Three fostering projects had made "little or no progress" (addendum, para 1.4).

The social work expertise came from council staff. The Transformation Update says a "seconded team of six senior leads from Children and Families" delivered the programme alongside Newton. The reported changes, such as the Stability Forum and the Connecting Families team, are run by council staff.

Newton's contribution, going by the documents, was method and capacity. That meant tracking key metrics, running design cycles, building dashboards and tracking benefits. EY noted the approach relied on Newton's experience of "similar programmes" elsewhere.

This matters for the money. A saving counts towards Newton's results if Newton had any involvement (Sch 5, para 4.6). The more of the work council staff did, the more that rule favours Newton. Council staff were also there to "maximise skills transfer" (Sch 20, para 5.5.1).

• What did Newton do that council staff could not?
• Which skills were transferred, and to whom?
• Could £7.67m have funded permanent posts that stay after the contract ends?

How progress was tracked

Four meetings ran the programme (para 6). Each should have left papers and minutes.

A graph in para 1.15 shows the expected savings against Newton's cumulative fee to March 2027. The contract says those figures "have no bearing" on the Fee Guarantee.

Social value and the EPIC charity

Newton's social value promises include £10,000 for a local community project and 80 hours of expert support to a local voluntary group (para 2.2). The contract routes these through the Bristol Impact Fund, the Quartet Community Foundation or Can Do Bristol. It does not name EPIC. Other promises include 12 to 24 weeks of work placements "engaging with Bristol Care Leavers first", seven apprenticeship vacancies and promoting foster caring to Newton's local staff.

At Full Council on 14 July 2026, the council said suppliers are signposted to donate to EPIC as "only one option". Its written answer also said:

• EPIC was set up by council employees. It is not a council care leaver partner.
• The council's Corporate Parenting Manager "must always have a role" in the charity.
• Running EPIC is part of an officer's job, one day a week, with volunteer trustees.
• The council's Corporate Parenting Strategy 2024–29 names EPIC.

EPIC's website says it gives £500 grants to care-experienced young people, for things like driving lessons and hobbies. It says it funded 19, then 20, then 21 grants in successive years. The council's own corporate parenting plan is also called "Our EPIC Plan".

The grants go straight to young people, and that purpose is not in question. The questions are about governance. A council officer runs, on council time, a charity that council suppliers are encouraged to fund. Those suppliers may be bidding for council contracts. Open questions:

• Did Newton's £10,000 or 80 hours go to EPIC?
• How much have council suppliers given EPIC, and did any donation count towards a bid's social value score?
• How does the council manage the conflict of interest for the officer and the Corporate Parenting Manager?
• Who pays for the officer's day a week, and is it recorded as council support to the charity?

Red flags

The strongest concern is that Newton helped set the baselines it was then measured against. Eight of the twelve points below are findings from the documents. Four are open questions.

What checks out: every invoice matches the contract to the pound, and the 2026/27 payments match the £1.47m reported in the Transformation Update.

What is still hidden

The one clause that ties Newton's pay to results is redacted. Paragraph 3.1 of Schedule 5 says the Fee Guarantee makes payment "contingent against delivering a measurable result". The amount, the refund terms and the method for counting savings (Schedule 5, paras 3.2–4.5) are blacked out. As of 25 September 2026, the Information Commissioner's Office is still considering a complaint about the redactions (IC-432151-J4L2).

Records that would show what Newton actually did:

• the exit and transition plan (due 31 March 2026)
• health check reports
• Programme Board and Benefits Monitoring Group minutes and papers
• Newton's monthly highlight reports
• social value reports, including where the £10,000 went

Sources

• Call-off contract DN773871, as released by Bristol City Council (PDF)
• Families First business case addendum and Children and Education Transformation Update, Bristol City Council committee papers
• Bristol City Council written answer, Full Council public forum, 14 July 2026
• Department for Education: Family Routes, children who returned to care after leaving for adoption or to live with a special guardian (September 2025)
• EPIC Charity Bristol: What we do
• Bristol City Council: plans and policy for children in or leaving care