Unregulated care packages
Case reference FOI2025/01926
Received 2 October 2025
Published 16 October 2025
Request
1) How much has your LA spent in unregulated care/crisis intervention for children for each of the last three financial years? Please list the total amount spent for 2024-25, 2023-24, 2022-23 (if financial year not completed please include spend to date)
2) How many children are currently in unregulated packages of care (non/Ofsted registered provisions)
3) How many crisis packages have you commissioned in each of the last three calendar months? September 2025, August 2025, July 2025.
4) Please list each of the companies that has provided an unregulated care package in each of the following months (and how many packages they look after) September 2025, August 2025, July 2025, June 2025, May 2025, April 2025.
5) Please confirm how many of these are via a tendered framework of providers and how many packages have been 'spot purchased'.
6) How many of these children have been placed out of county?
7) Do any children currently require packages of care where placements have broken down and you are unable to find solutions? If so, how many children currently require accommodation?
Response
1) How much has your LA spent in unregulated care/crisis intervention for children for each of the last three financial years? Please list the total amount spent for 2024-25, 2023-24, 2022-23 (if financial year not completed please include spend to date)
2) How many children are currently in unregulated packages of care (non/Ofsted registered provisions)
3) How many crisis packages have you commissioned in each of the last three calendar months? September 2025, August 2025, July 2025.
4) Please list each of the companies that has provided an unregulated care package in each of the following months (and how many packages they look after) September 2025, August 2025, July 2025, June 2025, May 2025, April 2025.
5) Please confirm how many of these are via a tendered framework of providers and how many packages have been 'spot purchased'.
6) How many of these children have been placed out of county?
7) Do any children currently require packages of care where placements have broken down and you are unable to find solutions? If so, how many children currently require accommodation?
Answer: The answer to question 1 is not held in a form that would enable it to be located, retrieved and extracted within the Appropriate Time Limit which equates to 18 hours as defined by the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limits and Fees) Regulations 2004.
Our electronic reporting systems are unable to run a report for this information. To ascertain the data requested officers would need to manually check the list of unregulated placements from our system, however this does not define which of these unregulated episodes are specific placements that we have commissioned. An initial search has shown that 103 files of young people would need to be checked to establish whether the episode was a commissioned placement/or an unregulated arrangement, and it is estimated that it would take 15 minutes to check each file.
This would at a conservative estimate take at least 25.7 hours to complete. Where the Limit is exceeded Public Authorities are not obliged to supply the information requested by virtue of S12 of the Act. Please take this letter as a refusal notice under S17 of the Act.
I have been advised that the rest of the answers (Q2-7) can be answered within the limit, and the answer to all is zero. If you wish to refine the date range for Q1 please do so and I will put this to the service area to see if they could answer.
Documents
This is Herefordshire Council's response to a freedom of information (FOI) or environmental information regulations (EIR) request.
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