Swindon Borough Council is now facing huge costs because the number of children it has to care for is rocketing. The council’s figures show that the average cost of each child’s residential placement has risen to £7,300 a week. This amounts to an extraordinary £380,000 a year per child. This substantial increase in financial burden on families and individuals has raised worries over the council’s budget and spending as a whole.
Dixon agrees the need is acute with hundreds more children needing to be looked after. The work can be frustrating, he’s hopeful about the solutions he and his coworkers are able to help implement. He said the council is “confident” in their ability to get the “savings needed.” Specifically, they intend to roll these savings out across the next fiscal year. This confidence will be key as they continue to face the new complexities and challenges exacerbated by the surging demand for care services.
Seth Harris-White leads on corporate parenting for Swindon Borough Council. He did provide some great context around the upstream forces creating the storm of financial difficulty that has befallen the council. He noted that the variance in costs is “primarily driven by an increase in the number of children being cared for by the local authority and a significant rise in placements within residential care settings.”
Even with these financial challenges, Harris-White said she was hopeful when looking at future projections. He said that the council has been in close collaboration with their finance and data teams. To do this, together they vetted past trends and successfully predicted future needs.
“We’ve worked with our finance team and the data team to look through previous trends to try to make an accurate forecast, and we’re not projecting such an increase.” – Seth Harris-White
The council is currently doing very important work to make sure that they are focusing on using resources efficiently, while not cutting care quality. They are hopeful they will not experience another such increase in care services demand in future years. This key relief would go a long way toward alleviating some of their financial pain.
