Unregulated Accommodation: 16 to 17-year-olds

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Tuesday 15th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Selous]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right; like him, I am a huge admirer of Dr Krish Kandiah, and I will say a little bit about that charity and what it can do later in my remarks.

In three of the unregulated homes that I visited in September with the police, only three out of the 17 children there came from Bedfordshire. All the other children were from other local authorities. They had all gone missing on multiple occasions; one child, indeed, had gone missing 41 times. Local authorities sending 16 and 17-year-olds to Bedfordshire include Stockton-on-Tees, Peterborough, Sandwell, Cambridgeshire, Oxfordshire, Swindon, Windsor and Maidenhead, Manchester, Birmingham, Essex, Nottinghamshire, Devon, Enfield, Barnet, Hillingdon, Redbridge, Waltham Forest, Haringey, Ealing, Merton and Croydon. Some of those have lamentable due diligence in their placing decisions.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I declare my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I congratulate my hon. Friend, who is generous in taking interventions. It is not just a case of the quality of the accommodation that many of these vulnerable young people are put into, or indeed the services available to them, but the locations they are placed in. Is he aware that some years ago in the Department for Education we produced “heat maps”, which showed areas where children should just not be placed? Children were being placed in homes on the same street as sex offender hostels, for example. There is a duty on directors of children’s services to ensure that the areas in which these children are being placed are appropriate and safe.

[Andrew Selous]

I completely agree; that is another reason for more regulatory oversight, which I will call for. Perhaps this issue needs to come up in planning policy as well.

Central Bedfordshire sends very few of its own children out of the area. As a Bedfordshire Member of Parliament, I am simply not prepared to accept this wholly unacceptable diversion of police resources caused by other local authorities acting irresponsibly and using provision that no local authority in Bedfordshire would put its own children in.

It is not as if this provision is cheap, either. A typical cost per child in these unregulated homes is around £800 per week, which is £42,000 per child per year. Some unregulated provision will cost considerably more than that, and it is completely unacceptable that taxpayers are paying such enormous amounts of money to private businesses, some of which do an appalling job and are more interested in making money than in looking after vulnerable children.

Given that several members of staff that I spoke to when I visited some of these homes told me that they needed no training whatsoever to undertake this work, I suspect that rates of pay are low and significant profits are being generated for the directors of these companies. Who is overseeing value for money for taxpayers, who are having to fork out these enormous amounts per child for such poor-quality provision, which in turn is placing a huge burden on other parts of the public sector such as the police?