Request
I would like the following information relating to all young people in care in Jersey over the past 5 years:
A.
Total number of children in care per year;
B.
Number of children in care sent off island per year to homes in e.g. UK or Guernsey or other because of shortage of foster homes in Jersey;
C.
Total cost to States of Jersey per year (including flights for children, social workers, accommodation costs, costs for arranging contact with birth parents etc) as a result of sending children in care off island because of lack of foster homes in Jersey;
D.
Number of children in care per year residing in other facilities in Jersey e.g. residential homes because of shortage of foster homes in Jersey;
E.
Total cost to States of Jersey per year to run all these other facilities, including building, maintenance, utility and other costs, salary costs for staff at facilities etc.
Response
A.
2010: 78
2011: 80
2012: 87
2013: 87
2014: 92
2015: 101 as of 17th March 2015
B.
To identify the number of children sent off-Island because of a shortage of foster homes in Jersey would require staff to manually review individual case files and interview social workers. Therefore, this question is exempt under regulation 2 (1) of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011. However, the Department can state that no children were sent off-Island due to a shortage of foster homes as of December 2014. All children who come into the care of the Minister have their needs carefully assessed and decisions regarding placements are made on the basis of these assessed needs.
At present we are conducting a piece of work entitled ‘The Children in Care Commissioning Strategy’ to identify the needs of children in care. This piece of work will identify and estimate the number of placements required for both foster care and Children’s Homes, on-Island and off-island.
C.
The Department does not hold records of costs incurred by the States of Jersey as a result of sending children in care off-Island because of lack of foster homes in Jersey.
D.
Placement matching is a careful and detailed process. Residential care is a positive matching choice for some young people. There are no children in care who are or were residing in other facilities in Jersey because of a shortage of foster homes in Jersey.
E.
There are no costs attributable.
Exemption
FOI exemption applied to Question 2:
Regulation 2 (1) of the Freedom of Information (Costs) (Jersey) Regulations 2014 allows an authority to refuse a request for information where the estimated cost of dealing with the request would exceed the specified amount of the cost limit of £500. This is the estimated cost of one person spending 12.5 working hours in determining whether the department holds the information, locating, retrieving and extracting the information.
