Staggering Costs for abducted/trafficked children

Are the costs appropriated for children in care or SEND by accident or are they part of a larger disgraceful thread.

There is a wider, documented thread connecting children’s care and SEND, but the evidence points more strongly to a structurally dysfunctional commissioning market than to local authorities simply receiving a bounty for putting a child into care or giving them a SEND designation.

For East Sussex specifically, the council currently advertises foster-carer payments of £430–£705 per child per week, depending on age and circumstances. That is about £22,360–£36,660 per year for one child. A parent-and-child fostering placement is advertised at £1,307 per week — £67,964 a year.

There is then the fostering agency/provider layer. Where a council uses an independent fostering agency such as FCA, the council pays the agency a placement fee, and the agency pays the foster carer out of that and retains money for staffing, administration, support and potentially profit. The Competition and Markets Authority found that the largest independent fostering agencies were historically charging an average of about £820 per child per week — £42,626 a year — with an average operating profit margin of 19.4% in its dataset. Those figures are from the CMA’s 2016–2020 data, so I would not present £42,626 as the current 2026 FCA rate without obtaining the present contract price.

There is also a genuinely child-specific education grant. In 2026/27, every eligible looked-after school-age child attracts £2,690 Pupil Premium Plus. For a child currently looked after, that money is paid to the local authority, which decides how much goes to the school, although retained money must still be spent for the educational benefit of looked-after children.

Then there can be SEND/high-needs education funding if the child has additional educational needs. This can involve substantial place funding and top-up funding, but there is no single amount automatically generated merely because the child is looked after. Likewise there can be expenditure on therapy, CAMHS, health assessments, transport, contact supervision, social workers, reviewing officers, guardians, experts, solicitors and court proceedings. Those are financially connected with the case, but they are payments for services rather than a simple per-child grant.

The really large figures arise with residential and specialist placements. East Sussex’s own 2025/26 documents show a £64.188 million budget for children-in-care placements, with spending significantly above budget. Its papers also record children in placements costing more than £10,000 every week, meaning over £520,000 a year for a single child. East Sussex reported 22 such children during Q2 2025/26. Nationally, the LGA has reported the same phenomenon, with around 1,500 placements costing at least £10,000 a week.

So the financial chain can potentially look like this:

Council/government funding associated with the child, including £2,690 Pupil Premium Plus and, where applicable, other specialist funding.
Council placement expenditure — potentially tens of thousands of pounds a year for fostering and hundreds of thousands for some residential placements.
Independent agency/provider revenue from the placement fee.
Foster-carer payments, such as the £27,149 figure in the FCA advert or East Sussex’s own £22,360–£36,660 advertised annual equivalent.
Tax treatment: foster carers receive unusually substantial Qualifying Care Relief; HMRC confirms that qualifying fostering receipts can fall within a specific tax-free calculation.
Education, SEND, health, transport, contact, legal and professional-service expenditure, depending on the particular child.

The important discovery here is that the £27,149 in that FCA advert is not necessarily the total amount being paid in relation to that foster placement. It is what FCA says the foster parent can receive. Behind that sits the amount the commissioning council pays FCA itself. That is the figure I would go after next.

For my East Sussex investigation, the useful FOI would therefore ask for the actual weekly and annual amount East Sussex paid FCA for each foster placement, the amount attributable to the foster-carer allowance, the agency/service fee retained by FCA, enhancements/add-ons, and the total paid to FCA in 2023/24, 2024/25 and 2025/26. That would let us establish the actual money chain rather than estimating it.

What makes the pattern significant is that government bodies themselves are now saying essentially the same thing across both systems. The Competition and Markets Authority found that the children’s social-care placement market was not functioning properly and that the largest private providers were earning profits materially above what would be expected in a well-functioning market. Its data showed average operating margins of 22.6% for large children’s-home providers and 19.4% for large independent fostering agencies.

The National Audit Office subsequently found that residential-care expenditure had reached £3.1 billion in 2023/24, an average £318,400 per children’s-home place, and described a market in which councils compete against each other for scarce places. It also found that seven of the ten providers supplying the most children’s homes were ultimately owned or part-funded by private-equity firms.

And now there is a strikingly similar finding in SEND. In February 2026 the Department for Education said independent special schools were charging an average £63,000 per child per year, compared with about £26,000 in a state special school, and that more than 30% of independent special schools were backed by private equity. The government explicitly said that public money intended for children with complex needs was flowing into private profit and announced national price controls and greater cost transparency.

That is no longer merely criticism from campaigners. In July 2026 the Government told Parliament that it intended legislation to introduce a price cap for independent SEND placements because of concerns about “high-cost, profit-driven models.” And the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 now gives the Secretary of State power to cap profits made by non-local-authority children’s homes and independent fostering agencies, including powers aimed at arrangements designed to disguise profit.

So there really is a common thread:

vulnerable child → statutory entitlement/duty → public authority must purchase provision → shortage of suitable provision → private provider has considerable pricing power → very large amounts of public money follow the child. cite https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2026/21/notes/division/6/index.htm

SEND and looked-after children are particularly exposed because councils cannot simply say, “that’s too expensive, we won’t buy it.” They have statutory responsibilities toward that child.

But there is an important distinction for your investigation. That does not establish that East Sussex makes money by taking a child into care or identifying SEND. In many cases the opposite is true: councils are being financially hammered by the costs. The NAO found the SEND system financially unsustainable despite high-needs funding reaching £10.7 billion, with very large accumulated local-authority deficits. cite https://www.nao.org.uk/press-releases/special-educational-needs-system-is-financially-unsustainable/

The darkest common thread.

The financial question much more serious, because it introduces a potential conflict-of-interest / self-dealing dimension, rather than merely “the care system is expensive.”

If you check the material, we published. The 2024 Care Homes & Councillor Ownership Review says it was specifically built by cross-matching roughly 4,000 accessible care-home/provider records against 2023 councillor lists, registers of interests, council disclosures and Companies House ownership/directorship records. Your methodology also records that the underlying official data were incomplete and that some matches still require individual verification. As the government has not updated the list of MP and the regulator The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has not ensured visits to check welfare have occurred in 2000 of these homes.

Why do Local Authority councillors run care homes

That is the chain worth testing.

And there is already broader evidence that the downstream market can be highly profitable. The CMA found unusually high profitability among major independent children’s-home and fostering providers, while the government has since moved toward powers to constrain excessive profits in children’s social care. That makes identifying who owns and controls the recipients of the money particularly relevant.

Our site also contains a separate dataset of 310 verified convictions, including 87 entries classified by your project as political/public-office cases and 210+ as care/residential/institutional staff. That dataset should remain separate from the ownership dataset, however: combining them rhetorically before demonstrating an evidential link between particular individuals could obscure what is actually a much stronger piece of work.

September 15, 2026