Bellwether

Councils buy care from companies. When a large operator collapses, councils discover their exposure afterwards. The care home sector has done this twice at national scale, and each time the state absorbed the consequences.

The data to see it coming mostly exists. The adult social care regulator publishes 57,009 active locations with a Companies House number attached to 91.1% of care home locations and 93.9% of beds. That is enough to compute, today, which councils depend on which operators. Measured directly: 40 council-and-company pairs where one company runs more than 15% of an area’s care home beds, including one London borough at 67.4%.

Children’s social care is where it becomes urgent. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 came into force on 15 July 2026, and its financial oversight provision sets out how to decide which providers get monitored. The criteria include "the geographical concentration of those establishments or agencies" and "the share of any market within England". Somebody now has a legal duty to compute exactly this.

The oversight gap is not an inference — the auditors have stated it. The care regulator monitors the financial sustainability of roughly 65 "difficult-to-replace" providers, about 30% of the market by beds. The National Audit Office found that councils get no benefit from that monitoring until the regulator warns them failure is likely, that sizeable regional providers fall outside the scheme entirely, and that the department collects no provider finance data of its own. The Public Accounts Committee was blunter: the department "appears complacent about the risks of local market failure" and "does not have a good grasp of how most providers on the ground are faring." Bellwether reaches 93.9% of beds.

The regulator also has no power to intervene to prevent a failure — only to notify councils once it is likely. The scheme exists because of a collapse in 2011; a second major operator entered administration in 2019. Committees have twice recommended provider cost transparency, most recently that from April 2022 all providers publish a breakdown of how their fees are spent. It was not implemented.

And the children’s register publishes owner names but no company numbers. The same is true of independent special schools, where the identifier field exists and is populated in 13 of 52,486 records. Measured consequence: naive name counting understates the largest special school group by 70% — 30 schools where the real figure is 51 — because the same owner appears as three different strings.

Bellwether resolves care providers to canonical organisations across three registers, then computes concentration and exposure at council level.

Where the regulator already publishes a company number, the join is direct — that covers most of adult social care. Where it does not, resolution is the product: matching owner names to companies through the corporate graph, handling the variants that defeat simple normalisation, and publishing match confidence rather than asserting certainty.

It then produces the exposure view: for each council, which operators hold what share of local capacity, and for each operator, how many councils depend on it and how concentrated that dependency is. One operator in the data runs over four thousand beds across only twelve councils — a very different risk shape from one running more beds across fifty-seven.

Financial distress signals attach on top, drawn from insolvency notices, charges and overdue filings rather than from accounting ratios, for reasons set out under risks.