According to a recent report from the National Audit Office, the cost of residential care in England has now reached more than £300,000 per child per year. Yet outcomes are not improving. Children are still experiencing unsuitable placements, frequent moves, separation from family and they are regularly placed in unregistered homes. In the NAO’s words, the system is ‘not delivering value for money.’
Read more in the Guardian

Behind these numbers lies something darker. Increasingly, taxpayer money is flowing not into children’s healing but into the profits of large private providers. The Competition and Markets Authority has already warned that many children’s homes are owned by private equity firms extracting high profit margins. Some report returns of more than 20% a year, while local authorities are forced to pay extortionate fees just to secure placements. You can read more about this here:
The Times and here.

There is a fundamental fallacy at the very heart of the system: the incorrect assumption that pouring money into placements, however expensive, can heal a rupture of attachment. But when a child enters care, the local authority’s legal duty is to the child, not to the mother (Children Act 1989, s.22). There is no statutory obligation to provide therapeutic support to her, even though she is central to the child’s story. 

Attachment theory has shown us for decades that security is built through consistent, loving presence. Remove that, and you cannot substitute it with an institutional placement, no matter the cost. And the outcomes bear this out: looked-after children are far more likely to leave school without qualifications, more likely to face homelessness, imprisonment, and mental ill-health, and their life expectancy is significantly reduced compared to peers (DfE data).

We are not underfunded. In fact, it serves private equity firms to keep pedaling this idea.

We are misfunded.

Public money is being diverted into private hands, while mothers and children at the heart of this crisis remain unsupported. It is a system that rewards scarcity and dependency rather than stability, reunification, and prevention.

That is why we started The Anastasia Project CIC. To build what the system overlooks: trauma-informed, body-based, relational support for mothers in the aftermath of child removal, leading to the successful rehabilitation, healing and restoration of the birth family. Because until we address the wound at the root of this problem, no amount of money poured into the branches will bear fruit.