News, Politics

Nottingham City Council still using unregistered children’s homes amid shortage of suitable care

By Joe Locker, Local Democracy Reporter

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Nottingham City Council is still using ‘illegal’ unregistered children’s homes due to a shortage of foster carers and suitable residential vacancies.

Service watchdog Ofsted rated the council’s children’s services ‘inadequate’ following an inspection in 2022, and it has been conducting a series of visits over the past two years to monitor improvements.

After Ofsted’s sixth and final monitoring in November last year, inspector Margaret Burke said sufficiency challenges in foster care “have resulted in Nottingham city’s continued use of unregistered children’s homes.”

The watchdog says unregistered children’s homes are illegal, and anyone providing accommodation to a child in a setting not registered with Ofsted when it should be is committing an offence.

Despite this, it says it has seen a “concerning rise” in local authorities using unregistered homes nationally.

Last year, Ofsted found more than 900 homes were unregistered, almost three times the number of unregistered settings found in 2021/22.

The Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) has been told 15 children had been placed in unregistered settings by Nottingham City Council as of July last year.

However, this has since been reduced to below five.

The issue was raised by Cllr Georgia Power (Lab) during a Children and Young People Scrutiny Committee meeting on Wednesday (January 15).

Ailsa Barr, director of children’s integrated services, said: “We do have a very small number in unregistered children’s homes, as do many local authorities in the country.

“We do have for those children in those circumstances extra management oversight, extra social worker oversight, and we have reduced the number of children in those arrangements in the last 12 months.

“We have reduced by more than 50 per cent the number. For context we are talking about less than five children. So we have already reduced that are we are continuing to reduce that.”

She said children are only placed in unregistered homes if a child cannot safely live at home, they have no extended family, or if there is no suitable children’s home or foster placement anywhere locally, regionally and – as a last resort – the wider country.

Cllr Power added: “It is a small number of children, but the impact on their life is huge. I appreciate it is a national issue, although not every local authority is in the same position so there are things that can be done.”

Councillors were told the issue is down to a shortage of foster homes and residential vacancies, while children with more complex needs do not typically “fit in to established homes”.

Cllr Cheryl Barnard (Lab), executive member for children, young people and education, said the issue had been worsened by the number of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children being sent to the city.

Unaccompanied asylum-seeking children can be transferred between local authorities in the UK through the Home Office’s National Transfer Scheme (NTS).

The NTS works as an agreement between local authorities to ensure children are fairly distributed across the country, as well as in suitable areas with suitable communities and opportunities.

“In Nottingham there are 162 unaccompanied asylum-seeker [children] in Nottingham. Out of those, only 42 are children we have placed into a foster care arrangement, so 120 are from outside the city,” she said.

“They are using up foster care placements in our city, for obvious reasons, so that is one of the pressures we face as a city, the fact other authorities place children here in Nottingham because it is thought to be culturally appropriate for them.”

In a recent study, published in November, Ofsted said there’s been a “steady increase” in potential unregistered homes. In the 12 months to the end of March last year, there were about 931 homes of this kind across the country.

For the same 12-month period ending in March 2022, the same number published by Ofsted was 315.

In the East Midlands as a region, the number of homes as of last March was 131, but the watchdog also said: “Local authorities are not legally obliged to tell us when they place children in unregistered children’s homes, so these numbers are not exact.

“We suspect there will be more children living in unregistered children’s homes that we are not aware of. However, it’s clear that local authorities are using unregistered children’s homes more.”

The council’s children’s services will undergo a final Ofsted inspection later this year.