The scandal of illegal childcare Britain is failing foster parents

I still remember the night Oscar arrived, crouched on my doorstep like a parcel no one quite remembered ordering. Fourteen years old, four foster homes in two years, and almost no schooling since he was 12. According to his last carer, he had perfected the art of disappearing into his room: door closed, headphones on, drinking energy drinks and gaming 24/7. Previous carers had taken to leaving food trays outside his door. They weren’t cruel; they were exhausted. And they had been warned, more than once, that setting firm boundaries might be “counterproductive”.

When Oscar did surface, it was usually to steal something, to kick in a fence panel, or to key a neighbour’s car. Not because he was a bad lad, but because rage felt better than numbness, a lesson hard-won from years of living with his unreliable birth parents.

I was the on-call foster carer for older children that week. The plan was the same as for all emergency placements — hold him for 72 hours while the council found something more permanent. But with a rap sheet like Oscar’s, no one local would take him. I wanted to offer him some stability since there was a sharp-witted, likeable boy in there, but I couldn’t. I already had two other kids under my roof. In the foster care system, love is rationed by square footage and safeguarding ratios.

Two weeks later, following a string of increasingly frantic phone calls from his social worker, a residential placement was scraped together. As I drove him to the children’s home, the only one within 50 miles with a spare bed, his knee shook so hard that it set the coins in the cup holder rattling. I made a show of cheery small talk, pointing out a barrel-chested dog trotting alongside its owner, a badly parked van, anything to fill the silence. He said nothing, pressed his head to the cold glass and watched the streets he knew blur into unfamiliar estates.

I’ve taken children to residential units before: beige corridors, curling posters on the wall, the stale tang of disinfectant. Places that call themselves homes but feel more like a dentist’s waiting room. But this one wrong-footed me. The house was bright. The paint was fresh. There was a garden with a basketball hoop and proper goals. As we walked in, a girl of about 13 burst through the door, kicked off her shoes, grabbed a biscuit and a glass of milk, and headed upstairs after a breezy “Hiya” to the staff. In the living room, a boy was lining up a shot on the pool table, trading gentle insults with a worker who looked genuinely pleased to be spending time with him. Oscar hovered in the doorway, eyes darting and scanning for threats. Then he drifted over, picked up a cue, and asked whose break it was. For a moment, he looked like any other teenager chilling after a day at school.

I drove home relieved that he’d landed somewhere that felt as close to a family home as an institution possibly could.

But the feeling didn’t last. Because for every Oscar who ends up in a decent registered home, there are others sent to places that aren’t homes at all — unregistered, unregulated, sometimes barely habitable. They may be dressed up as “unregulated placements” or “alternative provision”, but the law is clear: they’re illegal. According to the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), nearly 800 children in England were placed in illegal accommodation in 2024 with each staying there for six months on average.

The Care Standards Act 2000 makes it a criminal offence to run a children’s home without Ofsted registration, while the Children Act 1989 says councils should only place children in registered settings. But in practice, desperation trumps legality: a recent parliamentary report noted that “unregistered placements [are] the ‘slightly less unacceptable’ of two unacceptable alternatives, the other being a child not having a placement at all”.

Hundreds of vulnerable children are trapped in these legal grey zones, housed in makeshift settings like converted bungalows on industrial estates, short-term Airbnbs, or chilly caravans stranded on out-of-season holiday parks long after the tourists have left. These aren’t just emergency stopgaps for a night or two: on average, children placed in unregistered accommodation end up spending 185 days there.

Councils foot eye-watering bills for the arrangement. Public money is pouring into what amounts to a shadow care system, one that operates with minimal oversight and that cost councils £105 million in 2023 alone according to a Observer report. There are no routine Ofsted inspections, no guaranteed safeguards, and often inadequate support for the children who need it most.

This stands in stark contrast to the rigorous, often deeply intrusive checks rightly imposed on foster carers, such as enhanced DBS vetting for all household members, repeated every three years or sooner if concerns arise, annual reviews, unannounced supervisory visits, full background checks, and ongoing Ofsted scrutiny of the fostering agency itself. These safeguards are designed to protect children in family-based care, but are conspicuously absent in these shadowy, high-cost alternatives. In 2022-23, Ofsted failed to prosecute a single provider, despite investigating some 845 of them, according to the Observer.

Admittedly, these aren’t easy children to place. Many have been chewed up by the system already, with histories of absconding, self-harm, violence, county lines, exploitation. A growing number are placed under Deprivation of Liberty orders, extraordinary legal measures meant to keep a child safe when there is nowhere secure for them to go. In theory, such children should be in specialist provision. In reality, there are vanishingly few beds. So judges sign off placements they know are unlawful, because the alternative is a child sleeping in a police cell or in the corridor of the local A&E.

This is the quiet scandal at the heart of modern child protection, a system so paralysed by its own rules that it authorises what the law itself declares criminal, all while subjecting ordinary foster families to relentless scrutiny, low pay, and poor professional status.

Some unregulated places amount to not much more than a mattress on the floor of a damp bungalow, supervised by a rota of agency staff who change every few days, none of whom will still be there when the child finally dares to trust them. These makeshift “secure units” have doors that can’t be modified for safety because of fire regulations, and windows that open from the inside, making it impossible to prevent a suicidal teenager from climbing out at 3am. There is no registered manager, no meaningful oversight, no one trusted to run to in the middle of the night. Absurdly, councils are, in effect, running illegal homes by proxy and pretending not to notice.

Short-term holiday lets are among the bleakest options. They look fine on a booking website: neutral décor, a kettle, a television. In reality, they are emotionally barren. Children move from one to another as bookings run out, dragging their bin bags of belongings with them, never quite unpacking — because, what’s the point? You can’t child-proof them properly. You can’t build anything resembling stability. So, once again, a damaged young person internalises the message that they hold no real value, that they are disposable, unworthy of consistent love or a place that truly belongs to them.

And all of this is the downstream consequence of a quieter crisis — the slow collapse of foster care. The pool of foster carers in England has been shrinking year on year. Thousands of families have left the system in the past few years alone. Many of those who remain are exhausted. They talk about being treated like disposable labour, about endless paperwork and little practical support, about being blamed when traumatised children behave exactly as traumatised children do.

The shortage fractures children’s lives in ways that are rarely spoken about. Siblings are split because no one has the space to take three at once. Children are sent miles from their schools, their friends, their football teams. Add to this the strain of caring for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, and you begin to see why councils are scraping the barrel of provision. When there is no foster home, no residential bed, a hotel room for a homeless child starts to look like a reasonable solution.

So why do people stop fostering? Often, it’s the sheer exhaustion of fulfilling an emotionally draining role over several years: caring for traumatised children, managing challenging behaviours, navigating complex family contact sessions in their own homes, and coping with secondary trauma or compassion fatigue. But burnout isn’t the only driver. Sometimes the system itself pushes carers out by punishing ordinary human frailties, such as a momentary lapse in patience or else the adoption of more structured, common-sense disciplinary techniques over the gentle, trauma-informed parenting styles that have been mandated in recent years. Corporal punishment is strictly forbidden (as it should be), but even non-physical methods that feel “authoritarian” to professionals can trigger scrutiny and allegations from social workers, which leaves carers feeling undervalued, micromanaged, or unfairly blamed when things go wrong.

It reminds me of Rebecca and Hugh, who fostered Chloe from the age of six. They had been through years of failed IVF and poured all their love into this small, wary girl. When Chloe was 14, she was groomed on the bus as she travelled home from school. He was in his late twenties. He waited for her every afternoon from then on, telling her she was beautiful, and that he understood her. One night she dressed up and said she was going out. She wouldn’t say where. Rebecca and Hugh did what any parent would do. They locked the door.

Chloe complained to her social worker. Rebecca and Hugh were told they had no right to “hold her against her will”. Terrified of losing their registration as carers, they relented the following weekend, following at a distance. They saw the man with her in a shop doorway, his hands groping and rough. Rebecca intervened. Chloe, ashamed and confused, reported them for stopping her. An emergency panel deregistered them as foster carers. When told she wouldn’t return, she pleaded to stay with Rebecca and Hugh, the only stable home she had known.

Instead, she was uprooted and placed in residential care, a stark, institutional setting far removed from the family warmth she had grown used to. Rebecca and Hugh, who had devoted years to nurturing her through challenges, homework, birthdays, and everyday milestones, were suddenly cut off from the child they regarded as their daughter. Their “crime”? Acting like ordinary parents, setting boundaries, enforcing rules, and responding to her needs in ways that felt instinctive and loving to them, but which the system deemed insufficiently aligned with preferred approaches or perhaps too firm in the eyes of professionals reviewing the placement.

This kind of abrupt removal from a long-term foster home, especially after deep attachments have formed, is painfully common, placements ending not due to abuse or neglect by the carers, but because of perceived mismatches in parenting style, or unresolved concerns about boundary-setting.

We talk endlessly about safeguarding children, but we rarely talk about safeguarding the adults willing to care for them. We expect carers to open their homes and their hearts, then we bind their hands so tightly that they cannot act on the most basic parental instincts. It is hardly surprising that many decide they cannot do it anymore.

There is a deeper cultural shift too. We are no longer encouraged to build lives around duty and commitment. We are encouraged to optimise our own happiness, to avoid burdens that might limit our freedom. Fostering is the opposite of that; it takes both an emotional and practical toll. It asks for patience without guarantee of reward. When fewer people are willing or able to make that sacrifice, the children who most need ordinary, boring stability are the ones who lose out.

I still love my “job”. The small victories — a teenager sleeping for the first time without the light on, a shared biscuit, a game of cards that ends in laughter rather than a slammed door — but affection alone cannot sustain a broken system.

We pour hundreds of millions into a shadow economy of unregulated, profit-driven placements while the stable, loving foster homes we claim to value are allowed to wither. The contradiction is glaring: the state demands near-perfect compliance from private individuals, yet routinely flouts its own laws when convenience or cost demands it.

If we are serious about ending the scandal of illegal placements, we have to make fostering viable again, with proper financial support, real respite, access to therapeutic help, and a culture that treats foster carers as partners rather than underlings. We need to stop quietly normalising the warehousing of damaged, parent-less children in places where we wouldn’t put our own. Because every time we do, we reinforce the message that they are too much trouble for anything resembling a proper home.

*Names have been changed.

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