Education Secretary Michael Gove has criticised the practice of councils placing young people in children's homes outside their area as "indefensible". He also cites children being "decanted" away from friends and family as a contributing factor to instances of child sexual exploitation by gangs.
As part of wider plans to improve the safety and quality of children's homes, the government last month published a "children's homes data pack" on quality, location, ownership and cost, in a bid to increase transparency in the system.
One of the headline statistics is that almost half of children in children's homes are placed outside their home authority - some 46 per cent (2,249 children) of the total of 4,890. Indeed, all local authorities placed at least some children outside their boundaries, but the use of out-of-area placements is far from uniform - 16 of 152 councils place all of their children in homes out of area, while at the other end of the spectrum, four authorities placed 10 per cent or fewer outside their boundaries.
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