The charity Become estimates that around one in five children in care in England is living far from their local area. The Department for Education's own analysis of placement location shows the pattern has drifted steadily upward over a decade, with a meaningful minority of looked-after children placed not just outside their local authority, but beyond every neighbouring authority too.
The sector talks about this as a commissioning problem. It is worth pausing on what it is for the child.
A distant placement severs, in one move, most of what a care plan is supposed to protect: school place, friendships, siblings, a trusted social worker, a grandmother who visits on Sundays. Contact becomes a diary negotiation measured in motorway hours. The child's world is rebuilt from zero by strangers: capable, well-meaning strangers, but strangers. Care leavers describe the experience in consistent terms: dislocation, invisibility, a feeling of being administratively moved rather than looked after.
Sometimes distance is right. A child at risk of exploitation may genuinely need to be somewhere their exploiters cannot reach. But the DfE's data and every commissioner's lived experience say the same thing: most distant placements are made not because distance serves the child, but because nothing closer exists on the day the placement is needed.
The Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 leans into this problem. It gives formal recognition to sibling relationships in care arrangements, and it advances Regional Care Co-operatives, designed to help councils plan and commission together so that children can be placed closer to home. The Greater Manchester and South East pathfinders will tell us a great deal about whether regional planning can actually reshape supply.
But legislation sets direction; it does not build homes near the children who need them. That is done, or not done, by providers choosing where to invest and by local authorities signalling demand early and credibly enough for providers to respond.
So a question for both sides of the market: when a sufficiency statement says "we need local provision", what would it take (in commitment, in planning support, in honest dialogue about need) for that sentence to become a building with children in it?
