Kent County Council Paid £27m to Place Children in Unregistered Homes Over Two Years.

Last month, The Shepway Vox Team revealed how Kent County Council paid Catalyst Care Limited £2,419,480.59 between 2021 and July 2025.

Catalyst’s two controlling directors subsequently admitted offences involving three unregistered children’s homes in Kent and nine children. KCC has now confirmed separately that it placed ten children with Catalyst.

At the time, one of the biggest unanswered questions was whether Catalyst represented an isolated breakdown in KCC’s commissioning controls.

We now have our answer.

It didn’t.

New Freedom of Information data covering roughly the last two years shows Kent County Council paid £27,054,033 in connection with children placed in unregistered provision.

That’s not a marginal problem tucked away at the edge of children’s services. It’s more than £27 million passing through a system intended to be used only in exceptional circumstances. The national data identified around £255 million of spending, meaning Kent alone accounts for approximately 10.6% — more than one pound in every ten — of the expenditure identified from responding councils. Nearly half of English local authorities didn’t provide usable figures, so that percentage mustn’t be confused with Kent’s share of the true national total.

And suddenly our Catalyst investigation looks rather different.

The £2.42 million we identified in KCC’s published ledger covered several service descriptions and can’t simply be treated as money spent on the three illegal homes, nor can it safely be subtracted from the new £27.05 million figure. The datasets and periods aren’t directly comparable.

But Catalyst now demonstrates something much more important.

KCC was dealing with at least one provider subsequently criminally convicted for operating unregistered homes while the council itself was making extensive use of unregistered provision elsewhere.

That raises questions about a system, not simply one company.

County Hall knew unregistered provision carried serious risks

KCC’s own papers make uncomfortable reading alongside the £27 million figure.

In January 2025, officers told councillors that emergency unregistered placements could be among the council’s highest-costing placements, and warned that providers might lack the “necessary skills, experience and knowledge” required to work effectively with a child.

KCC said such accommodation was used “only exceptionally”, where there was no alternative, circumstances were of “imperative necessity” and the placement was essential to prevent a breach of the child’s Convention rights.

The same report identified another problem familiar to anybody following local government outsourcing in Kent: KCC was largely buying residential placements through spot purchasing from private providers, leaving prices heavily influenced by the market and giving County Hall limited financial control.

KCC went further, saying the strong influence of the private market left it with “little leverage” over prices.

That matters when £27 million is involved.

Then there’s the audit

Perhaps the most striking piece of the Kent jigsaw came before all of this.

KCC Interal Audit examined “Unregulated Care Placements” during 2023/24

Its conclusion?

HIGH assurance.

Prospects for improvement?

VERY GOOD.

Auditors said KCC had documented placement guidelines, quality-assurance visits, provider questionnaires and approved-provider arrangements. Payment accuracy was confirmed in the sample examined, while commissioners demonstrated that the children sampled had been placed through KCC’s Approved Provider List.

The audit even said KCC had established a “systematic approach to track and monitor the registration of provisions” as providers moved into the new Ofsted regulatory regime.

Only one low-risk issue was recorded: a document relating to one young person had mistakenly been placed on another young person’s file. No high or medium-risk findings were reported.

That doesn’t mean auditors inspected every property subsequently used by KCC, nor does it establish that every unregistered placement forming part of the new £27 million figure sat within the audit sample.

But £27 million makes the obvious question unavoidable:

How effective was KCC’s supposedly high-assurance control system at preventing children ending up in accommodation which should have been registered but wasn’t?

Twenty-seven children became ten

County Hall says things have improved.

In September 2024, KCC recorded 27 unregistered placements. By October 2025 that had fallen to ten.

Its latest Sufficiency Strategy says a lack of registered places, including delays in Ofsted registration, could leave the authority with no alternative but to use unregistered accommodation. KCC says there’s a robust process providing greater oversight and that placement plans are routinely updated.

A fall from 27 to ten is significant.

But it also provides another clue about how a £27 million bill can accumulate.

These aren’t necessarily cheap emergency beds.

KCC itself said emergency unregistered provision can sometimes represent its highest-cost placements. And in 2024/25 alone the authority spent £108 million on placements for citizen looked-after children, including £51 million on residential care, despite only 187 of roughly 1,400 children being in residential placements.

KCC decided it could do it cheaper itself

County Hall has already concluded that relying so heavily on the private market isn’t sustainable.

In February 2025 it approved plans for four small KCC-owned children’s homes, each with two beds, initially backed by £3.8 million capital funding.

The financial case estimated KCC-operated provision would cost £9.98 million over five years, compared with £15.19 million for private provision, producing an estimated £5.21 million saving.

Those homes are specifically intended for children with complex needs and those who might otherwise end up temporarily in high-cost unregistered provision.

By late 2025 the project cost had risen to at least £5.5 million, partly because specifications changed and the proposed properties became larger, although KCC had secured up to £2.766 million of Department for Education match funding.

Even £5.5 million looks rather different beside £27.05 million.

And Ofsted has changed the landscape

There’s good reason why registration matters.

Ofsted says unregistered children’s homes leave children without the normal independent regulatory safeguards and can expose extremely vulnerable youngsters to unsuitable or unvetted people. In 2025/26 alone it opened 850 cases concerning potentially unregistered children’s homes and supported accommodation; 710 were determined to be settings which should have been registered.

Ofsted is now taking a harder line. Its inspection framework puts greater emphasis on councils ending their reliance on unlawful unregistered homes, while new enforcement powers strengthen action against people operating them.

That brings us back to Kent.

The issue isn’t whether social workers sometimes face an appalling choice between an unregistered placement and leaving a deeply vulnerable child without anywhere safe to sleep.

They plainly do.

The issue is how something supposedly exceptional and emergency-only became associated with £27,054,033 of KCC expenditure.

After Catalyst, County Hall should now publish an anonymised breakdown showing how many children account for that £27 million, how many separate placements there were, how long each lasted, the amounts paid to each provider, the highest weekly cost, whether each provider or property later became registered, and what registration checks KCC carried out before every placement.

It should also explain how many of those providers were on its Approved Provider List and whether any were subject to Ofsted warnings or investigations while Kent children remained with them.

Because Catalyst no longer looks like the story.

It looks like the warning.

And £27 million suggests Kent’s real story is considerably bigger.

The Shepway Vox Team

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