Roger Taylor is a former councillor on Calderdale Council.
The Children’s Social Care system is in many cities and larger towns collapsing, in large part as a disastrous consequence of the broken Immigration system.
The public is rightly outraged at the financial burden that vast numbers of legal and illegal immigrants are placing upon the taxpayer in terms of their accommodation, whether it be four-star hotels, luxury barges, flats built for students or military accommodation upgraded for the newcomers to our shores.
Whilst there are numerous other very noticeable pressures and problems brought upon our society by unsustainable levels of immigration, with many of those arriving coming from societies where the norms are incompatible with life in a Western Democracy, what I consider to be an existential threat to local government remains largely invisible to the public, but not for much longer.
As noted by Lord Morse, Interim Chairman of Oflog, whilst the councils which have issued Section 114 notices at the time of writing were the result of poor leadership at the relevant councils, a significant number of well-run councils are now struggling to set balanced budgets for future years, due to cost pressures largely in the Social Care sector.
The problem of funding care for an ageing population which is living longer is well documented and it is fair to say that resolving the problem has been kicked down the road by various governments for decades.
However, the unsustainable funding pressures caused by the rocketing demand for residential care placements for the children of immigrants are not so well documented, nor is it as widely discussed, for reasons which if I was feeling cynical I might describe as “cultural sensitivities”.
I was recently stunned to the point of initial disbelief during a conversation with a friend during which he mentioned that a child placed in residential care costs the average local council roughly £5,500 per week and rapidly rising. I was equally taken aback when he stated that in large cities, anywhere between 40 per cent and 60 per cent (and rising) of the children being placed in these expensive placements are children whose mothers are immigrants.
I decided to read up on the Children’s Social Care market and the damage that it is doing to council budgets and discovered figures which make the £8 million per day spent on migrant housing look near insignificant.
The recent Competition and Markets Authority found the “Purchased Placements” market for children in care is dysfunctional. Suppliers are profiteering from demand for places in care increasing faster than supply.
In the 2020/21 Municipal Year a Purchased Placement cost an average of a little over £3,500 per week, £182,000 per year increasing to £5,556 per week, £288,912 per year in 2023/24, a 37 per cent increase over three years.
As a resident of Halifax in West Yorkshire, I decided that the first council in dire financial straits that I would look at, would be neighbouring Bradford Council, where the Council Executive have been arguing that the Council’s collapse is due to the structural funding shortage in Children’s Services and the opposition are arguing that whilst this is a problem, it is the Executive’s mismanagement of the Children Services over several years.
Whilst having read the relevant information, it is clear to me that Bradford Council’s current financial collapse is blatantly of its own making, it is also obvious to me that even if the Council was much more competent than it has been, it would have been able to balance its budget for only a few years more, without urgent action to make Children’s Social Care sustainable.
Bradford Council reports that its average current cost per child residential placement, is at the time of writing £6,498 per week, £337,896 per year, which dwarfs the £4,258 per month, £51,100 per year cost of housing adult immigrants in nice hotels etc. The immigrant child in care is costing more than six adult immigrants in a hotel and the public don’t even know about the scale of it.
Sadly, the number of immigrant children in care is rising at shocking rates in major cities throughout the country. Using Bradford Council as an example again, in the 2017-18 Municipal Year, there were 42 children in external care placements, but this had risen to 214 by the end of 2023 at a combined cost at least £65 million to £75 million over the period.
With each increase of three children in care placements coming in at a cool £1 million per year, dozens of councils will become effectively bankrupt in a couple of years or so unless there is an urgent, serious intervention.
The long suffering taxpayers are soon to be rudely awakened to the uncomfortable fact that their local councillors are going to have no choice but to close libraries, recycling stations, theatres and museums, whilst increasing parking charges, filling fewer potholes and delaying or cancelling new build community facilities, in order to meet their statutory obligation to fund the unsustainable costs of caring for huge numbers of immigrant children.
The day when our political masters in Parliament finally recognise and react to the fact that the failure to control our borders is the cause of an existential threat to local councils as we know them, cannot come soon enough.
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Author: Roger Taylor
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