Fostering is big business

Here is Christopher Booker:

A Norfolk reader sends me photographs of an advertisement placed on the back of local buses by Norfolk and Suffolk county councils. "New challenge," it reads. "Have you thought of fostering? If so you can earn £590 a week."

Two things are interesting about this, one general, one specific. For a start, it shows what mind-boggling sums are now available to councils whose social workers take children into care. I have quoted before advertisements offering foster carers £400 a week for each child. But £590 a week means that a foster home looking after three children taken from their parents, which is not uncommon, can now earn almost £100,000 a year. In addition are the lavish fees charged by fostering agencies to make the arrangements, almost invariably run by ex-social workers.

Most people have no idea what a big business fostering has become. When one such firm, National Fostering Agency, representing 175 local authorities after being launched by two ex-social workers in 1995, was placed on the market by Rothschilds in 2012, it was sold by its "venture capital" owners Sovereign to a "private equity" firm, Graphite Capital, for a staggering £130 million.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/children_shealth/10882715/Why-the-explosion-in-child-snatching-is-big-business.html