Council forced to place vulnerable children into illegal homes because system is ‘broken’, says leader
Bristol City Council is being forced to place children in care into illegally unregistered homes because the system is “broken”, the authority’s new leader says.
Cllr Tony Dyer told a council meeting that the root cause was a lack of accommodation for vulnerable youngsters and that this needed to be fixed.
As reported by the Local Democracy Reporting Service this week, Ofsted is considering a “full criminal investigation” after the council admitted having to take the action numerous times.
The children’s services regulator does not have the power to prosecute local authorities placing youngsters into unregistered homes but it can charge the providers themselves with a criminal offence.
It has ordered City Hall bosses to either ensure the homes it uses register with Ofsted or remove the children.
Cllr Dyer (Green, Southville) told the audit committee on Monday, 22 July: “This is not a political comment but the reality is that we’re dealing with a broken system and the underlying problem is a lack of registered placements that we can put children into.
“That is something we need to fix and I’m sure everybody in this council understands that we need to be able to provide the right number of placements and for all those placements to be registered, but that will take time to do.”
A council investigation into the issue, called an internal audit, gave a finding of “limited assurance”, which is the second lowest of four possible conclusions.
Council director of children and families Fiona Tudge told the meeting: “There has been a national increase in the number of children in care which causes a huge issue around our placements sufficiency.
“In Bristol we have also seen an increase in our number of children in care and so we are impacted by that.
“As of today we have 769 children in care and seven children that are in placements that are unregistered. That means they are not registered by Ofsted.
“Most often these are children who due to their trauma are displaying behaviours that registered providers feel they are unable to provide safe care to, so we are unable to identify registered providers.
“This audit looked at those. The outcomes of that are around our management actions in terms of the quality assurance of those providers who aren’t registered, so we need to undertake action around some of our processes.
“We’ve already done some of that. We are reviewing our policy procedures.”
She said that would go alongside changes to their “practice direction” which sets out how staff decide to put children into homes and monitor them.
Ms Tudge said: “There is national recognition that these placements are sometimes used.
“We are not uncommon in having to use these placements.
“It is common practice for local authorities to ensure they have arrangements in place for when they place children in this unregistered provision.
“It is unlawful but our children’s courts understand that this happens, they are aware that these placements are being used for some of our children and they have oversight of some of those children.
“Although it is unlawful, it’s highly unlikely to be prosecuted and we’re not aware of any other local authority that has been prosecuted.”
She said one Bristol child had been living in an unregistered home since 2022 and that Ofsted had refused to register the provider because of planning issues unrelated to the youngster’s care.
Ms Tudge said the other six children currently in unregistered accommodation were short term since May.
She said: “These children are moving as soon as we can from these unregistered placements.”
Cllr Cara Lavan (Green, St George Central) said: “I can understand there are circumstances whereby children might be in an emergency scenario and have to be placed in an unregistered placement.
“However, what concerned me was that the follow-up checks weren’t taking place, there wasn’t a weekly check, there wasn’t a monthly check.”
Ms Tudge said: “Visits are monitored. A few of these were missed but not by much. We’re not talking about a long time. For weekly visits they were missed into the next week.
“We have oversight. I chair a weekly meeting when we look at when the child was last visited.
“The audit found that that wasn’t being recorded consistently on the child’s record so it couldn’t see my escalation in terms of when the child needs to be visited.
“We’ve now rectified that and the minutes of those meetings will always sit on the child’s record.
“We always did have oversight but it wasn’t evidenced clearly on the child’s record.”
She said that because of the urgent nature of the placements, the commissioning team often did not have time to visit the home beforehand but that every child was accompanied by a social worker who would review the property.
