EXPOSED: British Councils Are Paying hundreds of millions to PREDATORS to “Care” for Children.

The focus of the Political Parties are on illegal Immigrants!

In Britain  Councils are paying fortunes to unregulated, illegal care homes—leaving society’s most vulnerable children in the hands of criminals and organised gangs. 

Investigative journalist Tom Wall exposes Britain’s shadow care system: a multi-billion-pound crisis fuelled by austerity cuts, private equity profiteering, and regulatory loopholes that local authorities exploit to bypass Ofsted inspections.

The  report has revealed the shocking number of vulnerable kids being sent by local councils to live in illegal children’s homes. Nearly 800 children were placed in illegal accommodation across England in 2024, staying for an average of six months each.

The Public Accounts Committee (PAC), which produced the report, said the figure was “unacceptable” and children were being put in danger by a broken system.

The homes in question are illegal because they are not registered with Ofsted. This means they don’t have to pass routine inspections and so there are no guarantees of quality or safety.

Councils say unregistered homes are only ever used as a last resort, when no lawful accommodation is available. But evidence from the children’s commissioner for England shows that these placements are not always an emergency stopgap – and in fact they often last for months at a time.

“The children’s residential care system in England is not working, with too many children being put at risk as a result of being placed in inappropriate homes,” said the report.

In illegal children’s homes involves hundreds of companies – and a quarter of a billion pounds

• Hundreds of companies have received £255m to run unregistered children’s homes

• Tens of millions in taxpayers’ money has been paid to firms linked with care failings

• Operating homes without Ofsted registration is a criminal offence, but there are at least 500 such companies in England alone

The booming illegal children’s homes industry in England has been revealed for the first time, setting out the sheer scale of this shadow industry and the amount of public money being poured into it.

Payment records we have obtained from local councils reveal that hundreds of businesses are running children’s homes that are not registered with Ofsted. In total, they have been paid a quarter of a billion pounds in taxpayers’ money.

Unregistered homes are subject to no routine inspections and offer no guarantees of quality or safety. Operating them is a criminal offence. But a chronic lack of legal provision means councils are increasingly turning to them as a means of housing the country’s most vulnerable children.

Our investigation reveals that over the last two years, more than 480 private companies have operated illegal children’s homes, receiving £250m for 1,800 placements.

Given that nearly half of local authorities in England failed to respond to our freedom of information requests, the true figures are likely to be far higher.

We have also traced £40m of that money to companies linked to care failings, including those involved in the care of a teenage girl harmed in a succession of illegal homes in Peterborough.

Our findings lay bare the reality of an industry that operates without regulation. Some companies are run by people with no previous experience in care work: directors are security bosses, or come from the music business or the military. One company in our dataset is owned by an overseas private equity firm.

Many of these companies have no public profile, their names familiar only to council commissioners. Yet they are handed huge sums of public money to supervise some of England’s most at-risk children: at least eight councils paid companies over £1m for a single placement.

Rachel de Souza, the children’s commissioner for England, said our findings showed wider failings in the care sector.

“Local authorities are paying extortionate sums of money for placements that were intended as an emergency measure but have since become an accepted part of the system,” she said.

“This investigation raises serious questions about the millions spent by local authorities on placements when they cannot guarantee that vulnerable children are receiving the safeguarding and quality of care they need.”

How to prosper

The company to have received the most money relating to illegal children’s homes is an agency that provides staff for them.

London-based nursing agency Prospero Health and Social Care has 11 offices in the UK as well as operations in Australia and New Zealand. The company’s accounts show owners Robert and Lesley Grays received more than £4m in dividends in the last two financial years. In the same period local authorities paid Prospero at least £7.6m for staffing illegal homes, our investigation found.

Despite the legal questions around such arrangements, the company openly advertised roles in “unregistered settings” on its website. In a statement, it said this wording described the “range of council-arranged environments in which staff might be asked to work” and was not intended to give the impression that the company was responsible for illegal accommodation.

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the chair of the PAC, said: “The stated purpose of the children’s social care system is ‘to provide care for those who need it so that they grow up and thrive with safety, stability and love.’

“For the hundreds of children highlighted in our report living for months in illegally unregistered homes, a lack of oversight means we cannot know whether their circumstances are indeed safe, stable or loving.

“This utterly unacceptable situation has become normalised, but there is nothing normal about this unsustainable state of affairs.”

All unregistered residences are among England’s growing number of privately run children’s homes, which now account for 84% of all such homes. Concerns have been raised over their excessive profits.

According to the Competition and Markets Authority, the 15 largest providers of children’s social care in 2022 enjoyed average profit rates of 22.6% for children’s homes and their prices increased by an average of 3.5% above inflation each year. Seven of the 10 largest providers are owned by private equity.

The shortage of homes in certain parts of the country has driven up costs and pitted councils against each other. In December, Ofted’s chief inspector described it as “an ongoing national scandal”. The PAC said the Department for Education (DfE) has failed to address the issue.

Clifton-Brown, Conservative MP for North Cotswolds, said: “Without a good understanding of the motivations, debt and potentially excessive profits of private providers, government cannot effectively oversee a market with players within it who could very well be over-leveraged with debt.”

Last year, we reported on an instance where Isle of Wight council had spent over £500,000 to place a vulnerable 10-year-old boy in an illegal home for four months. The boy was subject to a deprivation of liberty order (DoL), which gave staff permission to restrain him.

The placement, which cost £29,000-a-week, prompted a high court judge to remark: “You could send him to Disney[land] Paris for a month and save some money.”

We also revealed that Cornwall council had launched a multimillion-pound recruitment drive to staff illegal children’s homes – showcasing just how normalised they have become. The council was forced to withdraw its ad after a complaint by the Children’s Homes Association (CHA), which represents registered providers.