NEW figures showing that lots of of youngsters live in unregistered children’s homes, often owned by private firms that receive no formal inspection or scrutiny, are a call for people to “offer homes with care and commitment”, the Christian charity Home for Good and Safe Families said this week.
The placement of 669 children in illegal homes last yr was “what failure looks like in children’s services: when an absence of fine options is what dictates the standard of care given to a baby with complex needs,” the Children’s Commissioner, Dame Rachel de Souza, said on Sunday. The figure, collected from local authorities and finalised on 1 September 2025, showed that too little had modified for the reason that data were collected the yr before, when 764 children were listed in such homes.
The costs, she wrote in her report, were “staggeringly high”, at a weekly average of £10,500. Over the past 12 months, councils had spent an estimated £353 million “putting a few of the country’s most vulnerable children in settings that can’t come near meeting their needs”. Thirty-six individual placements had cost greater than £1 million: “an enormous expense that might have as a substitute been spent on earlier intervention, keeping them closer to family members and ensuring stability of their lives”.
In 2025, there have been 81,770 children in care in England and Wales. This represents a rise of 30 per cent since 2010. About two-thirds were placed with foster carers, while children’s homes accommodated 12 per cent. While the number of youngsters’s homes has increased, they are sometimes positioned outside a baby’s home borough, in areas where housing is cheaper. Only some can provide certain specialised varieties of care.
The Association of Directors of Children’s Services warned in 2024 that the financial pressures regarding the price of youngsters’s homes was “unlike anything now we have experienced before”, against a backdrop of “effectively bankrupt” local authorities. The needs of youngsters in care were “increasingly complex”, and there was a “growing evidence base showing some large private providers are generating significant profits from vulnerable children and the general public purse”. The estimated average annual expenditure per child in a children’s home increased from £239,800 in 2019-20 to £318,400 in 2023-24 in real terms.
By law, children’s homes should be registered with Ofsted, which identified 680 unregistered homes last yr. The Children’s Commissioner’s report found that 89 per cent per cent of the illegal placements reported by local authorities were supplied by private providers.
The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, currently within the House of Lords (News, 9 May 2025), includes latest enforcement powers for Ofsted to issue civil penalties against providers operating unregistered children’s homes, while there are plans to enable the Education Secretary to cap the profit that could be made out of children’s social-care placements. But Dame Rachel has expressed concern concerning the pace of reform.
In her report, she called for “robust investment in models of early intervention and therapeutic support, as a substitute of counting on costly crisis placements”. This should include “a plan for recruiting specialist foster carers, rapidly increasing the variety of high-quality children’s homes and higher join-up between services including a commissioning strategy that considers children with high or complex needs who require the support of multiple services”.
There was also a necessity for “a fundamental shift in how we take into consideration risk — and what which means in a vulnerable child’s life”, she said. “We can not pretend that locking child in a flat under constant commentary, or putting them in a caravan without proper facilities, is the ‘risk averse’ option. It is deeply dangerous, deeply harmful and can’t proceed.”
Responding to Dame Rachel’s report this week, a press release from Home for Good and Safe Families said that the guts of the issue was “a chronic shortage of family-based care. Too few foster carers, specialist carers, and supported lodgings hosts mean local authorities are left with limited options, forcing them to choose from bad and worse placements.”
The charity, founded in 2013, works to equip and train prospective foster carers and encourage people to supply “supported lodgings” to 16-to-25-year-olds (News, 8 November 2024). “This report makes it clear that change won’t come through policy alone,” the charity’s head of advocacy, Sam Lomas, said this week. “It will come through people stepping forward to supply homes with care and commitment.”
At the tip of last March, there have been 33,435 fostering households, ten per cent fewer than in 2021. As of 2022, the most important group of all approved foster carers were of their fifties (41 per cent), while 27 per cent were over 60 (News, 21 July 2023).
