Ofsted promises to penalise councils using illegal children's homes

Ofsted promises to penalise councils using illegal children's homesImage source, Getty ImagesImage caption, Both councils and unregistered children's homes face fines and penaltiesByNoel TitheradgeInvestigations correspondentPublished7 minutes agoLocal authorities who place children in care in unregistered homes could face being downgraded in performance inspections, Ofsted's chief inspector has said.Councils may be graded as requiring 'urgent improvement' and penalised in the running of their Children's Services departments under the regulator's proposals to tackle the issue.Sir Martyn Oliver told the BBC's Today programme that the practice of companies themselves running illegal placements was a "scandal" and that they will face fines.He added that local authorities may be penalised under new plans for changes to inspections.Ofsted has failed to successfully prosecute a single provider since their use first emerged around a decade ago.In 2021, the government banned the use of children's homes which are not registered with Ofsted following successive BBC investigations.We discovered that one girl was trafficked directly from her home and sexually abused while a boy was kidnapped from another home to sell drugs.Children in care as young as ten were also regularly moved between caravans and narrow boats.At the time of the ban, local authorities complained that they were forced to use them because there were not enough placements in registered children's homes.But with the supply of children's homes doubling in the past eight years - as private equity and property investors entered the market - illegal placements might have been expected to stop.Despite this, the practice has only grown with the cost of these placements also rising sharply.In May, the BBC revealed that three local authorities in England spent more than £2 million each on a single child's placement in an illegal children's home...