Children’s home charged Sheffield Council £12,000 a week – as director slams 'silly cost'

A senior officer at the council says private care for children has ‘silly prices’ and the council needs to provide more homes itself to cut down on the cost.

Director of children and families Carly Speechley told a meeting: “The cost varies but on average, an internal residential placement will cost us about £3,000 a week to provide for ourselves. That’s our accommodation, staffing and all the associated costs.

“An average residential placement externally would be about £5,000 but we have gone up to £12,000 in some cases.

“For an independent foster agency placement it’s probably about £950 a week. Ours cost about £350 so independent placements are significantly more.

“We have got more children in our own foster care and our own internal provision but you don’t need a lot of children in private provision, particularly residential, for it to quickly stack up in terms of costs.”

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The cost of children’s services

Sheffield’s children’s services currently has a Good Ofsted rating but Coun Mike Chaplin said he was concerned budget cuts could put services at risk.

Ms Speechley replied: “My budget is currently £23m overspent and the expectation is that we will bring that back into line in the next financial year.

“It’s hugely challenging how we make those savings and maintain good services to children. We’ve got a budget strategy that is predominantly around investing to save.

“There’s two areas of spend in my department, one is staffing, so the more children we support the more staff we need to keep caseload at a reasonable level so that the quality of service we provide is good enough.

“The other spend is on placements for looked after children. We are significantly overspending on placements and that is never more so than during the pandemic.

“We’ve currently got nine children’s homes. If we provide our own placements we are not dependent on the market – and the market charges silly money for some of these placements. We can also provide a better quality of provision.

“We are seeking capital investment to build more of our own provision so that we can bring that placement budget down. We’re currently spending £8 million more than we’ve got in the budget for some placements.”

More children are needing help

Ms Speechley said the budget had also been hit by peaks in demand. There has been a nine per cent increase in looked after children.

“We’re hoping to achieve a reduction in demand through continued investment in early help.

“We need more placements because we’ve got more children in care, we’ve got more children in need and more children on child protection plans. We’re hoping demand will reduce and we’ll be able to manage more with early help.”

During 2020/21 there were 674 children looked after by Sheffield Council. During the same period, 170 looked after children left care through adoption, special guardianship, child arrangement orders or returned to their families.