Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many serious incident notifications his Department has received in each of the last 12 months regarding children in care placed in (a) unregistered and (b) unregulated accommodation.

Local authorities do not provide serious incident notification data broken down by ‘unregistered’ or ‘unregulated’ accommodation. They do however provide information on lodgings and semi-independent settings, which are unregulated. Between 1 September 2019 and 31 August 2020, the department received 21 serious incident notifications where the local authority stated the child was resident in lodgings or a semi-independent unit at the time of the incident.

We have consulted on a set of ambitious proposals including banning children under the age of 16 from being placed in unregulated accommodation and how to enforce new national standards for providers to drive up quality, keeping young people safer and delivering better outcomes. More information is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/unregulated-provision-for-children-in-care-and-care-leavers.

We will be responding to this consultation and setting out our plans for ensuring the high-quality of unregulated semi-independent and independent accommodation in due course.