United Kingdom

A UK council has spent over £500,000 to house a vulnerable 10-year-old boy in an illegal children’s home for four months, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) can reveal.

Isle of Wight council has been charged £29,000 per week for the placement in a semi-detached house leased by the local authority, at which the boy was the only resident. The home is not registered with Ofsted, the education and care watchdog, which makes operating it a criminal offence.

Remarking on the cost to the public purse, a judge said: “You could send him to Disney[land] Paris for a month and save some money.”

At a high court hearing last month, Mr Justice Keehan called the standard of care at the home “wholly inadequate” after hearing allegations of staff’s frequent use of restraint and the boy’s social isolation.

Social workers took the boy into care last year. He had been traumatised by witnessing domestic violence and deemed beyond parental control, and has since been placed in a series of illegal children’s homes.

The hearing concerned the council’s application to renew permission for staff to closely supervise the boy and restrain him if necessary, known as a Deprivation of Liberty (DoL) order. The use of DoL orders for children as young as 10 is rare.

The boy’s experiences, laid bare in the legal proceedings, highlight the failure of the social care system to provide for vulnerable children requiring high levels of supervision.