Caerphilly County Borough Council is spending £16,500 a week for a child’s care placement, it has been revealed.
The admission was made by the council’s assistant director for Children’s Services Gareth Jenkins during an evidence session of the Welsh Assembly’s Public Accounts Committee.
The committee of AMs is looking at the cost of caring for looked-after children in Wales.
Members were told that councils were struggling with a lack of residential care and foster carers.
Mr Jenkins said Caerphilly currently had the highest in-placement care paying £16,500 a week for a child’s placement in London.
He said it was the only placement in the country that would take the young person from a secure unit.
He said: “We’ve been searching every day, every week, every month, which is why we are opening our own unit in Caerphilly for that one young person.
“It’s probably the most extreme [example] I’ve come across in over 30 years in social work, but some of the numbers are creeping up there – £10,000, £11,000 a week.”
Sally Jenkins, the head of Children and Family Services at Newport Council and chair of the All-Wales Heads of Children’s Services Group, described the lack of residential care and foster carers as a “crisis”.
She said: “This is a very difficult world in order to recruit foster carers currently and despite all the best initiatives, the support and the finance that we as local authorities can offer, there are not enough foster carers or people who want to be foster carers out there.”
Ms Jenkins also said that most councils had overspent their budgets on looked-after children as there were no alternatives.
She added: “You can’t have a child just not having a placement so we don’t have options in this.”
Yet another example of the councils incompetence and arrogance in the management of its finances.
It seems their attitude is money no object – we can always ask for more !
I have no experience, nor knowledge, of child care in these circumstances but the sums of money involved are staggering. As we have administrators in charge on six figure salaries I am astounded that we have no provision for eventualities like this. As you say. “we can always ask for more” money!
The worrying thing is that the article states this information was gained during an evidence session of the Public Accounts Committee.
So presumably if it had not been made public at this committee the facts would have remained hidden from the public ( much like the senior officers pay scandal ).
The council are always purporting to be open and transparent – to date there is not much evidence of that…..indeed it is quite the opposite !
You can ignore a problem but you can’t ignore the consequences of ignoring a problem.