Moving children far away from home in a privatised care system

Your report on vulnerable children being sent to care homes hundreds of miles away from where they live (Councils ‘unwittingly helping drug gangs recruit children’, 17 September) makes for uncomfortable reading. More than a third of children are being placed out of their local authority area, and these children are far more likely to go missing or be exploited.

The placement should be selected because it suits the child’s needs best, not because it suits the needs of the system’s. Yes, there is a shortage of placements. Yes, it is labour-intensive to involve the child at every stage. But social care must look at long-term outcomes, rather than just immediate safety concerns if we expect to improve lives.

Being moved into a care home miles away from friends and school, unless there is a very good reason, can be hugely damaging. Working in a children sexual exploitation and missing service, I am in no doubt that what young, vulnerable people need to get back on track is good people around them, a decent place to live and a purpose in life. Our children deserve this, and that responsibility is on all of us.
Sarah Parker
Catch22 Stoke-on-Trent & Staffordshire CSE and missing service

• Your article rightly raises concerns about the numbers of out-of-area placements for children in care, although it misses one key point, which is that councils are being put in this position because they cannot control the placements from what is a largely private-agency-run sector. Nationally, over 45% of foster care placements and over 80% of residential care placements are with private agencies. This area is dominated by agencies that are owned by private equity finance companies and they have absolutely no obligation to accept placements of children from host authorities. There are around 45 residential care beds for children in Liverpool, but less than 50% are made available to us to place those children, who are in our care.

Private foster care providers with carers in Liverpool also use up placements by taking children from authorities as far away as the south-east. This happens because these private agencies are driven by fees and profit, and will fill their placements from any council anywhere in the country. Councils all over the country have become dependent on private companies that have no duty to care for children from local authorities in the area where they are based. That is why we in Liverpool, along with other councils, are opening our own residential care homes again, and campaigning to recruit foster carers who will register with the council to replace those registered with private agencies. It is about time that the government improved the regulation of children’s foster and residential care to make these private agencies accountable to local authorities and have a duty to children first, and it should ban profit from children’s care, as Scotland has done.
Cllr Barry Kushner
Cabinet member for children’s services, Liverpool city council

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