Council spends millions on external care agencies
UP TO £400,000 a year could be being paid for looking after just one of Cardiff’s children in care as the council spends millions of pounds every year on external agencies.
Cardiff Council has spent £23m each year on average since 2014 on private companies or charities to provide fostering or residential placements for the city’s looked-after children.
Last year the most expensive cost for a child’s residential care at an external agency was £7,800 per week – which would cost £405,600 at that rate for all 52 weeks of the year.
The number of Cardiff ’s lookedafter children has increased over the past five years – with some of the city’s children being sent as far afield as Liverpool or the east of England for care.
The money spent on private care placements for looked-after children is also rising – while placements provided by the council are a fraction of the cost.
From a total of 930 children at July 7 who were looked after by Cardiff Council, 326 were placed outside the city and 155 of those were in neighbouring areas.
A further 51 out-of-county children were placed with either their parents or kinship carers.
Children taken into specialist homes or secure units often have complex issues, with some suffering
the worst forms of physical, sexual or emotional abuse or neglect.
This leads to behaviours which are too challenging for them to be placed at a foster home, which means they sometimes have to be sent across the UK to receive specialist care.
They often need to be monitored 24/7 to prevent the risk of substance abuse, self-harm, or falling into the clutches of drugs or sex trafficking gangs.
Over the past five years the council has used a range of providers to care for its looked-after children, including UK-wide organisations such as Action for Children and Welsh providers such as Genus Care.
Cardiff Council has also sent its looked-after children to local authorities in Wales such as Bridgend, Caerphilly, Neath Port Talbot and Vale of Glamorgan, and in England, such as Milton Keynes and Peterborough.
In 2018-19, Cardiff Council spent £11,715,857 on external agencies providing residential placements and £16,089,741 on fostering agencies.
It had 514 children with private fostering agencies and 83 in private residential placements.
By contrast, the council spent just £2,976,486 on “in-house” placements that year.
There were far fewer children in placements provided by the council – 103 – but the average cost of this accommodation was significantly lower than for private agencies.
The average weekly cost for “inhouse” placements in 2018-19 was just £185 compared to £781 for a fostering agency and £3,394 for an external residential care placement.
The most expensive weekly cost for a council-provided placement in 2018-19 was £658 – and was for fostering care.
Cardiff Council has said it wants five new residential children’s homes to open in the city this year so children can be cared for closer to home and to save money.
The council also plans to launch a new fostering service so more looked-after children can be cared for in the city.
One Cardiff care home – Ty Storrie, which used to be managed by an external provider – has been managed by the council since June.
A new commissioning strategy for looked-after children will be debated by the council’s ruling body in September.
Councillor Graham Hinchey, cabinet member for children and families, said: “The cost of any external placement is based on a number of factors, including the type of accommodation required and the level of supervision needed to safely meet the assessed needs of the child.
“Wherever possible, we place children in Cardiff and we have local arrangements and agreements in place with education, health, housing and other key partners to support the care they receive.
“First and foremost we have to ensure that placements are fully tailored to meet the complex, varied and diverse needs of the individual and there is no single area in UK that has the range of provision to meet every possible care need.
“Where we access out-of-county care, we have robust arrangements in place to ensure that they are able to meet the educational, health and social needs of our looked-after children to the fullest extent possible.”
Cllr Hinchey said children living more than 20 miles from Cardiff “will be in those locations for a number of reasons, and it is important to recognise the circumstances involved in each case”.
“For example, the child could have moved away to live with their parents, or another relative,” he said.
“Some may have chosen an independent living setting in that area so they can stay close to their foster carers.
“The rising standards in children’s services has been recognised by a number of professional bodies, including the Association of Directors of Social Services Cymru and the Care Inspectorate Wales.”