Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what estimate he has made of shortages of foster carers by region.

The information requested is not held centrally as the department does not collect information on the number of foster carers.

Ofsted advise that they do not collect data on the number of foster carers by region. The official Ofsted fostering statistics provide the number of vacant fostering places as at 31 March but not the number of places that a region needs but does not have. The data on vacant fostering places is published at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/fostering-in-england-1-april-2017-to-31-march-2018/fostering-in-england-2017-to-2018-main-findings.