Pip: If you have ever wondered whether the phrase “the system is working as designed” could be both reassuring and deeply alarming at the same time, thestealingofemily.co.uk is here to help you hold both feelings at once.

Mara: Martin Newbold has been publishing across two connected territories this week — how the child removal and care funding system is structured in law, and what the growing conviction database reveals about political vetting and secrecy. Let’s start with the money, the legislation, and the question of where children actually go.

Who Pays, and Why: The DFE Funding Question

Mara: The central question the post titled “Why is the DFE paying local Authorities for your children?” is asking is whether a financial incentive is built into the child removal system — and if so, whether that incentive shapes outcomes.

Pip: The post lays the legal groundwork carefully. It traces the power back to the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009, and the key passage reads: “In exercising their functions, a children’s services authority in England must act in the manner best calculated to secure that any safeguarding targets set under this section are met.”

Mara: So the upshot is that councils are not merely encouraged to hit targets — they are legally required to. And separately, the funding regulations attach money to those outcomes, with per-child rates documented in the Children’s Services Grant at between roughly thirty-one thousand and forty-three thousand pounds per year at the base rate, rising far higher for complex placements.

Pip: The post is careful to separate the stick from the carrot. Section 195 creates the duty; Section 199 creates the payment power. They are different sections, but in practice they operate together — the targets bring in the money.

Mara: That structural point connects directly to “Where are the 758,000 Children?” — which asks what happens once a child enters that system and is moved across jurisdictions. The post draws a direct line from the 1860s child migration schemes, when Britain transported over 130,000 children to Australia and Canada without parental knowledge, to what it argues is a modern equivalent.

Pip: The mechanism described is a jurisdictional blind spot. England’s register cannot see Northern Ireland’s. HMRC cannot match a Child Trust Fund account if the name or date of birth on record is wrong. The post frames this not as administrative oversight but as the exploit.

Mara: And “Milestone 250 — Reached and Verified” adds the institutional layer. At 255 independently verified convictions drawn from police, court, and inquiry records, the database shows 87 public office-holders and 153 care and residential staff convicted of offences against children in their care.

Pip: Two of those office-holders voted on the very safeguarding bill designed to catch exactly that kind of offending. The post notes that neither declared any conflict of interest before the vote.

Mara: The pattern the database is building toward is that the failure is not isolated to any single layer — it runs from Parliament down through town halls and into individual children’s homes.

Pip: Which raises an obvious question about what the public is actually allowed to know about the people making those decisions — and that is where the next post picks up.

Vetting, Secrecy, and the 2026 Tribunal Ruling

Mara: The post “Full Document Absorbed — Locked and Verified: 310 Entries” moves from the conviction database into a specific transparency question: whether the public can find out if ministers have criminal records at all.

Pip: The post quotes directly on the Mandelson vetting controversy: “The First-tier Tribunal’s ruling of 23 July 2026 creates a further concern for the future: if a minister privately declares a conviction during appointment checks, the Cabinet Office may refuse to tell the public whether any such declarations were made — or even how many.”

Mara: What this means in practice is that the exemption, already present in the 2006 Safeguarding Act, has been extended. The Cabinet Office was asked how many serving ministers have declared criminal convictions. It refused to say. The tribunal upheld that refusal. One judge dissented, but the majority ruled the information stays withheld.

Pip: The post puts it plainly: the public cannot see the full record of the people writing the rules. At the ballot box, that record is deliberately absent.

Mara: And with 310 verified convictions now logged — spanning every layer from Parliament to individual care homes — the database exists precisely because official transparency does not.

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Pip: Two legal frameworks, one conviction database, and a jurisdictional gap wide enough to move a child through undetected. The architecture is the argument.

Mara: The next posts will likely push toward 400 entries and deeper into the Northern Ireland institutional cases. The pattern, as the site puts it, is no longer debatable.