Council spent £85,000 a week on single child's social care placement in 'broken' system
Cambridgeshire County Council is spending £200,000 per week on providing social care placements for six young people.
A council spent £85,000 a week on one child's social care placement, it has emerged.
Cambridgeshire County Council spent the amount on just a single child, its chief executive revealed.
Stephen Moir said the children's social care system was "broken" and that the council will spend £8.2m more than it had budgeted on its children, education and families services.
In a report to a strategy committee last week, Moir said a small number of placements for children was driving up costs, as the council estimates it will face a £23m budget deficit next year.
He said the council was currently spending £200,000 a week on providing care for six young people because of their needs, Cambridgeshire Live reported.
In one example, he said the council had been paying £85,000 a week for just one child because the support they needed required seven members of staff.
Moir said the placement had since been reviewed by council officers, resulting in a new regulated placement costing £30,000 a week for the child that still manages to meet their needs.
He described the current system as "broken".
He said: "We have the situation that crisis placements for children and young people that need residential secure support for complex needs - particularly those that may have behavioural difficulties, mental health issues, or indeed maybe violent or aggressive as a result of their conditions - those placements continue to cost this council an exorbitant amount of money, because the national market is broken.
“We have six young people, because of the high acuity needs they have, costing this council currently £200,000 a week because of the nature of their placement needs.
"That is replicated across all upper tier local authorities in England. This is a substantial problem and we see that coming through in our financial reporting this year and indeed other county councils in our own network are in exactly the same place.
“This system is one that from a financial perspective and a delivery perspective is without doubt, in my view, in crisis nationally.
"Something needs to be done to better support the people that we have a statutory duty to serve.”
Moir accused the government of failing to act on the recommendations of the independent MacAlister report into children's social care, published earlier this year.
The report called for a reform programme costing £2.6bn over five years to "make sure children and young people get the support they need".
Moir said providers have a "stranglehold" on the children's social care residential market which has led to increases in costs for councils.
Lucy Nethsingha, leader of Cambridgeshire County Council, said the cost of placements for children represented an "enormous risk" for the authority.
What do local councils spend their money on?
According to the local government finances report published by the House of Commons Library in June, councils in the UK spend most of their resources on education services and adult and children's social care.
The report said these three areas made up well over half of local government spending in 2021/22, much of it made up of ring-fenced grants.
In England, £37.7bn was spent by local authorities on education services in that financial year, while £20.6bn was spent on adult social care and a further £12.2bn on child social care.
Together, this made up 60% of all spending, which totalled £115.9bn.
Spending on police services was £14.7bn, while £5.8bn was spent on highways and transport services and £4.6bn on public health.
