Meet the Team

Meet the new Regional Care Cooperative (RCC) team who are passionate about improving the lives of children and young people in Greater Manchester!

Chantel Brown, Strategic Lead GM Regional Cooperative

Chantel brings extensive experience in strategy development, strategic reform and innovation across Local Authority children and family services. Chantel is a passionate collaborator, committed to system change to support improved life chances for the most vulnerable and disadvantaged children.

Key areas of responsibility within the RCC include:

• Strategic oversight and leadership
• Stakeholder engagement
• Fostering support and innovation

Steven Sinclair, Senior Commissioning Manager

Working in Local Government for 18 years and specifically spending the last 10 years in Children’s Services. Steven had the opportunity to work in a number of strategic leadership roles, deliver service improvement plans and co-produce new service delivery models. Steven is passionate about working collaboratively to help develop the best possible services for our children and young people.

As part of the RCC Steven is really excited to be helping lead on:

• Buying Better programme – a unique opportunity to explore new commercial partnerships with providers and Local Authorities
• Strengths and assessment tool pilot using BERRI - supporting Local Authorities in developing a comprehensive understanding of children’s needs
• Data and demand forecasting platform – with an ability to view sufficiency data, interrogate trends, and better forecast demand. This platform will allow Greater Manchester to be better equipped to anticipate children’s needs in advance, thus allowing the region to prepare to meet young people’s needs

William Morris, Senior Commissioning Manager

Over the past four years, Will has worked within Manchester City Council’s Homelessness Service, commissioning supported accommodation services for people experiencing rough sleeping across the A Bed Every Night (ABEN) and Community Accommodation Service Tier 3 (CAS3) schemes.

Will is excited about joining the RCC so they can help improve outcomes for children and young people, demonstrating how a regional approach to commissioning can help to tackle some of the sector’s most systemic issues.

Will’s role within the team will focus on:

• Supporting VCSE organisations to enter and shape an ethical and sustainable residential and supported accommodation market
• Building workforce resilience in the sector through targeted training, recruitment, and retention strategies
• Identifying opportunities to acquire provision through the RCC's Ethical Acquisition Toolkit

Sam Murtagh, Senior Commissioning Manager

Sam started their working career in the voluntary sector delivering after school and youth provisions and what at the time would have been termed areas of high deprivation.

They have worked for 4 local authorities in the North West in the Social Care, Disability and Educational sectors for the past 35 years, having worked in a number of children’s homes, short breaks homes in a variety of roles including the role of Manager and Service Manager they have worked as a Commissioner of services since 2002, during which time they have been responsible for a wide range of contracts, policy implementations, change management etc whilst keeping a strong focus on young peoples outcomes and life opportunities.

Sam’s role within the team will primarily focus on:

• Implementation of Skyline – 10 childrens homes for young people across Greater Manchester
• Buying Better – implementing different commercial models of contracting to enable improved utilisation of local care provision
• Building workforce resilience in the sector through targeted training, recruitment, and retention strategies

Jordan Newton, Senior Project Manager

Jordan has been working in local government for 6 years, throughout that time he has focussed entirely on change and transformation programmes within Children's Services. Working across a number of local authorities, Jordan has a keen interest in process improvement and digitisation. Jordan joined GMCA in July 2019 and worked with the team to create the UK's first Regional Care Cooperative, and continues into the first operational year to provide project management capacity to all work streams across the programme. 

Eilish Peters, Project Officer

Eilish provides support to all of the project streams within the GM RCC and has oversight of how they are progressing. Previous to their role within the GM RCC they worked within the Education, Work and Skills team at GMCA. In this role I provided project support to the GM Careers Hub and the Greater Manchester Baccalaureate, so that young people in Greater Manchester have a clear line of sight into the opportunities in Greater Manchester.

Eilish will focus on:

• Shaping Care and making sure that care experienced young people’s voices are fed into our work
• Workforce and recruitment in the sector

Hannah Groves, Lead Analyst

Hannah graduated with a first class integrated master's degree in mathematics from Lancaster University in 2024. Hannah worked as a research associate at Lancaster University where she was the lead health economist evaluating a joint response for children and young people experiencing a mental health crisis. Started working with the RCC in June 2025.

Hannah will focus on:

• Maintain and develop the data platform on children in care as well as the GM Sufficiency Observatory
• Deliver forecasts on anticipated demand for children in care placements
• Build dashboards and write reports to monitor the delivery and outcomes of the RCC