You’re a social worker. It's 7pm, you’re sitting in a room in your office with a very tired, very hungry and probably very scared child – they've been there since they finished school that day. You’re waiting for your placement officer to get back to you, again. You've probably been pestering them since 9am and you probably made the referral days ago. It’s the same response every time: ‘there aren't any placements.’ You take the child to McDonald's and hope that by the time they've eaten you have somewhere decent to take them. A question often nags at the back of your mind: is this really good enough? Is this the best we can do?
Eventually, you’ll pack their small number of belongings into an Uber and then settle them into a new home as best you can when you arrive, but there's no telling when or where that will be. It might be their first placement, it might be their fifth or 16th, but the story is often the same and across the country every social worker will have a similar experience.
What should be seen as a failure has become the norm.
ILLEGAL PLACEMENTS AND SOARING COSTS
In some of the worst cases, children are being placed completely outside the regulatory system intended to protect them. In January 2026, news broke about the skyrocketing scale of illegal foster and residential care placements in use by local authorities. A report by Public First recently revealed that in the past five years, the use of illegal care placement settings – those not registered with OFSTED, with no regulation or oversight has increased by roughly 370%. In worst case scenarios, the most vulnerable children with the most acute needs are being placed in caravan parks, hotels and AirBnBs.
At best, these placements tend to be care homes with minimally trained, often unchecked staff, usually under the ownership of private companies with no formal inspection or scrutiny. These placements, often used in an emergency, can cost up to £10,000 a week for local authorities, with children often staying for weeks or months – even if placements were initially intended as emergency stopgaps.
At the beginning of April 2026, a further LBC investigation found that there were more than 800 illegal children’s care homes operating across the UK. In one case, a young girl, aged 15, known to social services to be at high risk of sexual exploitation, was placed in an illegal setting in County Durham where she was subsequently sexually abused over the course of several hours. Two former soldiers, Liam Ramsay and Stephen Hurst, were hired as staff despite having seven convictions between them, at least four of which were violent offences. Over the course of several hours, Hurst and Ramsay plied the teenager with alcohol and drugs before returning to the home where she was sexually abused. The following day, the men covered their tracks, removing alcohol bottles, drug paraphernalia and blood from a nosebleed she had had the previous night. The girl ran away from the care home and was eventually picked up by police following contact with her mother by mobile phone. When LBC reporters gained access to the home they found holes drilled through doors, windows that couldn’t be unlocked or opened, and heard from neighbours of instances where staff would film and mock distressed children.
The Public First report stresses that these placements are not all poor quality and that the choice in these situations is often stark – does a Local Authority bow to using an illegal placement, or do they risk leaving a vulnerable child in a police station, hospital, or worse, on the streets? But by their nature, existing outside of any regulatory framework, it means the state ‘just doesn’t know what is happening to these children’ in these settings, and it runs the risk of adding to the trauma already experienced by these children and allowing them to slip between the cracks of a system straining to meet the needs of those it was meant to protect.
SHORTAGES, PRIVATISATION AND PROFITEERING
The UK now has more than 102,000 looked after children, with over 38,000 entering care in 2025 – roughly 106 a day. The figure is slightly down on 2024, but nevertheless represents a 15% increase from 2015. At the same time as this, the number of foster carers in the UK has shrunk drastically. Since 2020, the number of fostering households in England alone has dropped 12% and the Fostering Network estimates a shortfall of roughly 6,000 foster placements across the UK, with recruitment not even reaching replacement at the current rate. In recent surveys, carers cited rising financial pressures, lack of support from services, lack of respect, and the increasing complexity of children’s needs, without the backing of training or proper support to manage those needs. Research from the Fostering Network in 2024 highlighted that 60% of carers were considering leaving the system, and 58% reported experiencing burnout and other negative effects on their mental health. Against that backdrop, some carers have attempted to get organised – the National Union of Professional Foster Carers and the IWGB Foster Carer Workers Union have sought full employment rights for foster carers, along with better pay and conditions, however, these campaigns remain small.
In that context, local authorities are being stretched to their limit in order to find placements for vulnerable children, sometimes paying exorbitant retainer fees in order to hold a placement until a planned move can take place.
As a social worker in training, you quickly learn of a sort of hierarchy within the care system. In an ideal world, a child remains safely at home; failing that, social workers look first to family and friends, then foster care, then residential or semi-independent accommodation. While these decisions should be made around what is best for a child’s safety and development, they are increasingly shaped by economic pressures, with overstretched councils attempting to contain costs while simultaneously being forced into using extortionately expensive private providers as they haemorrhage in-house foster carers.
But scarcity is profitable and business is booming. Nearly half of all foster carers now operate through privately owned Independent Fostering Agencies, while 83% of residential care placements are privately owned. Nearly a quarter of all foster placements are through Private Equity backed agencies who siphon off large amounts of public money putting strain on already slashed local government budgets whilst leaving carers themselves struggling to make ends meet.
The total value of the country’s foster care market is estimated at nearly £2.2bn, with the largest firms making up to 19% profit from children in care each year. The average cost of a residential placement is now £6,100 a week, or £318,000 per year. On top of this, private providers are often charging exorbitant rates to councils for ‘specialist’ or ‘therapeutic’ placement where support rarely seems to materialise. In 2023, one council reported paying up to £63,000 a week for a specialist residential placement. Staffordshire County Council paid £2.6 million last year to house a teenage girl in a registered placement with 5:1 care.
As a result, the children with the most complex histories and most acute needs can be – and often are – refused by placement after placement, or moved through multiple foster placements in quick succession, with the search getting more difficult and the placement more costly each time.
SPLIT UP, LOCKED UP AND DISPLACED
This leaves children in limbo. Repeated moves retraumatise children, deepen feelings of abandonment and sever relationships at the very moment stability and familiarity are most needed.
Many children are moved far away from their communities, friends and schools. Over a fifth of children in care are placed more than 20 miles from their home area, driven fundamentally by shortages of foster carers across the UK. These shortages have also contributed to rising numbers of sibling groups being split up. Around 37% of children in care with at least one sibling – roughly 20,000 children – are separated from their brothers or sisters, often simply because no placement can be found willing or able to take them together.
At the same time, the number of teenagers entering care has increased, while adolescents are often considered among the hardest children to place. As a social care system designed primarily around harm within the home struggles to respond to growing risks outside it, in the form of criminal and sexual exploitation, children are increasingly moved across the country in attempts to distance them from perceived dangers in their local areas.
Some children are placed under even greater restrictions on their freedom, with limits imposed on where they can go, who they can see, or through constant supervision. The use of Deprivation of Liberty Orders has risen sharply, with 1,440 applications made in 2025 and nearly 1,200 granted. While intended as safeguarding measures, these orders remove fundamental freedoms from children and have become increasingly common amid severe shortages of specialist placements better suited to meeting complex needs. This increasingly punitive direction is particularly striking given the history of institutional abuse within Britain’s care system. From the Pindown scandal of the 1980s to the widespread abuse uncovered in Lambeth children’s homes and onto the illegal care home scandal unfolding today, history has demonstrated repeatedly the dangers of systems built around isolation, containment, and the silencing of vulnerable children.
THE CHILDREN’S WELLBEING AND SCHOOLS ACT
The Government has called their reform of children’s social care the biggest in a generation; it makes some attempts to address the crises bearing down on the social care system. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act is set to restructure the entire system of child protection in England – though what this major restructure will look like remains unclear. It provides extra money for recruitment of foster carers, with the government pledging to add 10,000 extra positions. It purports to tackle the rampant profiteering and agency worker use, prioritise sibling contact, and fine unregistered placements.
On the surface, these appear to be reasonable, long overdue reforms, but the Act ultimately treats the crisis in children’s social care as a problem of regulation and system management rather than one rooted in austerity, privatisation and the hollowing out of public services.
Measures aimed at curbing profiteering stop short of fundamentally challenging a care market increasingly dominated by private equity-backed firms. The Act provides powers for a profit cap on service providers, but the Government has suggested they will not implement this. Rather than tackling the causes of risk in the community, the Act creates a new form of deprivation of liberty for children to be put under. Recruitment targets alone cannot reverse years of burnout, falling pay, and worsening conditions for foster carers and social workers alike.
The legislation also says relatively little about rebuilding the preventative services that might stop families reaching crisis point in the first place. After more than 16 years of cuts to youth services, mental health provision, domestic abuse support, and welfare, the state increasingly intervenes only once situations have already deteriorated. In this context, reforms focused primarily on safeguarding and oversight risk managing the consequences of social crisis rather than addressing its causes.
WORKERS, CARERS AND CHILDREN IN CRISIS
Ultimately, the Act fails to get to grips with the root causes of the crises across the sector and continues to deepen cost saving and managerial measures rather than providing funding to rebuild services. Without substantial investment in local authority provision and wider social infrastructure, there is a danger that the reforms amount to institutional level neglect of some of our most vulnerable children.
The lack of clarity around some aspects of nationwide restructuring, in an immediate sense, leaves practitioners feeling less rather than more sure about their futures. Many social workers are worried that, in spite of changes, they will still be dealing with more numerous and complex cases with fewer resources. This lends itself to ‘check box’ assessments, where the lack of time and lack of access make assessments rigid and programmatic rather than providing social workers and families with the tools they need to get by.
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WORKERS' DEMANDS FOR CHILDREN'S SOCIAL CARE
With a system in complete meltdown, workers across children's social care need to demand thorough change.
UNISON has rejected the 3.3% local government pay offer and social workers should vote to strike to win an improved offer. We also need to go further. We should look to build struggles with other local authority workers to demand:
Introduce Safe Workload Caps – rising caseloads are driving social workers out of the profession at record rates and leaving vulnerable children in unsafe conditions. Nationally enforced caseload caps are needed to curb excessive unpaid overtime and burnout, and to keep children safe.
A total end to outsourcing – for too long local authorities’ budgets, already constricted by direct cuts, have faced overpriced, outsourced services, profiting off service users. Only by bringing the bulk of services back in house can that be halted. In the meantime, the Government should confiscate the profits of all outsourced services and reinvest them directly in Local Authority departments.
Fight the cuts; a full restoration of public services – already bled dry by austerity, local authorities continue to scramble to make cuts, driven by sky-high temporary accommodation costs and the price of outsourced services. We must fight not only for an end to cuts but for a full restoration of public services. In the face of excuses about financial responsibility and the economy the Government inherited, our response is clear: tax the rich. There is plenty of money and our communities cannot wait any longer.
Build more homes – in England 173,130 children are in temporary accommodation, with councils paying directly to private landlords to cover the shortfalls of housing benefits. The private sector will not build at the scale required unless profits are guaranteed. Councils and regional authorities have the motivation to meet social needs, but not the money. The solution is simple: give them the funds and the mandate to build.
Early Intervention and universal support – an overstretched social care system lends itself to fire fighting. Families only come to attention at flashpoints and in crisis and we work backwards to try and improve safety. This has been exacerbated by the hollowing out of early intervention and the closure of Sure Start Children's Centres. We must fight to rebuild services with the aim of prevention and early intervention, universally available to families without the need for professional referrals. Childcare provision should be made free at the point of use.
Expand welfare provision – poverty is the ‘wallpaper’ of child protection, ever present but rarely noticed. Families need money: time and again, research shows that when immediate financial pressures are relieved, families find more stability and safety. Expanding the welfare system, scrapping means testing, and putting money in families’ pockets would be transformative for many families.
Only by building those fights can we begin to fix our care systems and truly protect vulnerable children and families and improve workers’ conditions.
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