Children’s social care budget data since 2009
Case reference FOI2025/02510
Received 23 December 2025
Published 21 January 2026
Request
Consistent with the Freedom of Information Act, please can you provide me with the following information in Excel format:
1) What was your total children’s social care budget in each year since 2009?
2) What has been the number of children receiving funding or services from children’s social care for your area in each year since 2009?
3) How many residential care workers and agency staff involved with children’s social care have you employed in each year since 2009, broken down by location, role, and salary band?
4) Please provide figures for the annual amount of legal fees paid from your children’s social care budget in each year since 2009.
5) How much of your children’s social care budget has been spent on taxi fares, bus fares, and other hired transport in each year since 2009?
6) What is the average and largest distances to schools covered by funding from your children’s social care budget?
7) Please provide anonymised individual figures for the top hundred children that have the highest cost in your children’s social care budget for each year since 2009.
Response
Consistent with the Freedom of Information Act, please can you provide me with the following information in Excel format:
1) What was your total children’s social care budget in each year since 2009?
2) What has been the number of children receiving funding or services from children’s social care for your area in each year since 2009?
3) How many residential care workers and agency staff involved with children’s social care have you employed in each year since 2009, broken down by location, role, and salary band?
4) Please provide figures for the annual amount of legal fees paid from your children’s social care budget in each year since 2009.
5) How much of your children’s social care budget has been spent on taxi fares, bus fares, and other hired transport in each year since 2009?
6) What is the average and largest distances to schools covered by funding from your children’s social care budget?
7) Please provide anonymised individual figures for the top hundred children that have the highest cost in your children’s social care budget for each year since 2009.
Answer: The information for question 7 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 individual files for this information.
An initial search for question 7 has shown there is an average of 6,000 expense transactions which go through each month. This equates to an average of 72,000 transactions per year. It is estimated an officer could look through 3 transactions per 1 minute and identify the young person. Once the details had been identified this would need to be noted and once all files had been checked in this way, the total figures requested could be calculated.
This would at a conservative estimate take at least 400 hours per year to complete question 7. 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.
However, within the 18 hour limit, we can provide answers for questions 1-6 as requested. Please advise us if this is something you require.
Documents
This is Herefordshire Council's response to a freedom of information (FOI) or environmental information regulations (EIR) request.
You can browse our other responses or make a new FOI request.