A THIRD of looked-after children in Newport are living outside the city in other local authority areas, with the most expensive placement costing the council up to £16,000 per week.

The head of children and young people services at Newport City Council, Sally Jenkins, spoke to the council’s planning committee about an application for a new children’s home at Windmill Farm in Llanvaches and talked about the wider situation of looked after children in Newport.

She said: “Out of the 382 children that we currently have looked after by our local authorities, so those are the children that we hold parental responsibility for, 128 of those children are placed away from Newport.

MORE NEWS:

“Whilst for some of those children it’s the right thing to be away from Newport, for others it is undesirable and we clearly need to be able to fulfil our sufficiency duty to meet the needs of those children.”

Ms Jenkins said the local authority had “considerable and recent experience” of managing and setting up children’s homes.

She said the council hadn’t relied on private and charitable providers.

“We only have three privately provided children’s homes. It is very low for a city of Newport’s size.

“Currently when we’re buying external placements for children to look after them, we can be paying anything from within the region of £400 per week up to £16,000 per week.

“So the costs of these placements to the local authority are very considerable and whilst providing our own residential care should not be seen as a cheap option, we are able to make significant savings when we care for our own children.”

A separate report on looked after children in Wales said there were currently 20 children placed out of Wales, while most outside of Newport were in the Gwent region.