Agenda item - Chair's Communications

33.1    The Chair gave the following communication:

          Today's Fees and Charges report gives councillors a deeper insight into   the challenges the Council is facing financially, which have been         reported to Policy & Resources Committee.What I think it shows is just     how much of the situation we are facing is outside of our control to           resolve and presents a challenging picture for this Council in        the years      to come. So much of the services delivered by Families, Children and Learning are statutory services that we cannot turn down spending on,   but at the same time are being asked, year on year, to balance an    ever-demanding budget. 

          The costs of providing homes for children in care is increasing, we are   finding increasing difficulty with finding placements, and although we       have put the money we offer carers up, the cost-of-living crisis, in       particular, is making it harder for foster carers to commit. So instead, we       are having to place our children in residential care placements, which are expensive, and where the market is a providers market. The average cost of every residential care placement is around £250,000 per         year. It’s no wonder that the Competitions and Markets Authority       concluded last year that “it is clear to us that this market is not working      well and that it will not improve without focused policy reform”. 

          The government's commissioned study by Josh MacAlister concluded         that the answer was regional care cooperatives. Personally, I think this       is a real dodge of a real crisis because while we talk about the cost, it’s also about the care that young people are getting, which is the          most important thing, and I don’t believe that residential care is the           best option for children and young people in care. We know that care is     better when children are placed with foster carers, but on top of this, the        more we spend on paying private hedge fund backed residential care       homes to house our children, the less we can spend on really    essential support elsewhere for all our city's children. By the way, no           element of Josh MacAlister's study has yet been put into action.

          We are also seeing an increased demand on home to school transport      with more young people needing it, as well as a real difficulty finding    providers. This will be discussed in detail when we come to the          Home to School Transport report today.

          None of these issues are ours alone. A look across at so many other   councils show you   that they are facing the exact same issues we are.          Time and time again, when I meet with other councillors who do my role,    they say that it’s things like placement sufficiency and home to   school transport that's keeping them up at night. These issues will not           go away. They require policy or funding changes from government to           help councils like Brighton & Hove, but I remain pessimistic that these        days will ever come. We have been waiting years for promised reforms         to adult social care and the government’s since abandoned reforms have        made the cost problem worse, not better.