Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what the predicted cost of children looked after is in 2024-25; and what proportion of this is allocated to unaccompanied asylum-seeking children.

In 2023/24, local authority gross expenditure on children's and young people's services was £14.8 billion. Over half of that expenditure was on services for children looked after, which is a total of £8.1 billion (54.9%).

Expenditure under the last administration on asylum seeker services for children, within local authority children’s services, increased by 29.7% to £341.7 million in 2023/24. This accounted for 4.2% of the total spend on looked after children.

The asylum seeker services for children spending line is unlikely to capture all expenditure on unaccompanied asylum-seeking children (UASC). This spending line will only capture expenditure related to UASC that has not been recorded in other spending lines. For example, if a UASC is fostered then the associated expenditure will be captured in the ‘fostering services’ spend line by local authorities. These other lines are not disaggregated in the data collection so the department is unable to determine what proportion of fostering spend is spent on UASC.

The relevant data can be accessed here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/la-and-school-expenditure and data guidance and a breakdown of spending categories is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/section-251-2023-to-2024/section-251-financial-data-collection-2023-to-2024-guidance-for-local-authorities-compiling-their-outturn-statement.

In 2024/25, local authorities have planned expenditure on children looked after in gross terms to be £7.8 billion, of which £268.4 million is planned to be spent on asylum seeker services for children. The relevant data can be found here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/planned-la-and-school-expenditure.

Local authorities typically underbudget, so budgets are generally a poor indicator of actual spend, but they are currently the only published data available for 2024/25. For example, local authorities spent £1.5 billion, 23%, more than budgeted for in 2023/24 on looked after children. Gross planned spend on looked after children for 2023/24 was £6.6 billion and the actual spend on looked after children in 2023/24 was £8.1 billion. The relevant data can be found here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/planned-la-and-school-expenditure/2023-24#dataBlock-b3207b9e-46a0-4a1e-8e8a-7bfa46e2241b-tables and here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/la-and-school-expenditure#explore-data-and-files.