Baroness O’Neill of Bexley (Con)

My Lords, I would like to support my noble friend Lady Sanderson of Welton on Amendment 134A. Noble Lords will not be surprised to know I shall be championing local authorities around the cost of children’s homes. I want to give noble Lords a bit of a reality check, and to do so I am going to reference two examples. The first is about supported living for care leavers aged 21 to 25. They are nearly adults, need very little support and are very nearly independent. A semi-detached house is created that can take up to five young people with very little supervision. The cost for one young person in that provision is actually £500 per week. That is nearly as much as any landlord would get to rent out that property for a month: £2,000 a month. If you have got five young people in there, that is one hell of a profit margin. You can see why people go down that route and why we are having to grapple with the costs. The second case is about a property that had been sought and used as secure accommodation with 24/7 support. It was another council that placed it in our borough. It was worth it getting the property and having 24/7 support for secure accommodation. Obviously, it had made the decision that either it could not afford to get that accommodation through normal routes or that this was good value. We first knew about it when we read police reports saying this young person, who is in 24/7 secure accommodation with two people, had gone missing. I was jumping up and down saying, “We’ve got a young child gone missing”. But it was not our child—we did not even know this young person was in our borough. That is expensive accommodation. Earlier on, the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, said that you would know if people were placed in your borough—but you do not. I am sure the Minister will have something to say about that. In addition to the knowledge that this young person is placed in your borough, the cost of 24/7 care and accommodation for one person in your borough is phenomenal. Local authorities are not perfect, but we are grappling with some of these things on a daily basis, which push the costs up, and some of this transparency might deal with it. I look forward to the Minister’s response.