ALMOST £13 million has been spent on the Western Trust’s Looked After Children’s (LAC) services this year.
A Freedom of Information request made by the Impartial Reporter has revealed that £12,779,260 has been spent by the Western Trust on 609 placements.
An additional placement is being funded by the Health and Social Care Board.
Explaining the decision making process behind each individual placement, a spokesperson for the Trust said they were “informed by assessment to ensure that a child is appropriately ‘matched’”. 
“The Trust’s Foster Care and Adoption panels play a key role in informing and sanctioning matching placements and linkage to a child/children’s assessed needs,” said a Trust spokesperson.
Foster care placements available to the Western Trust’s LAC services include: mainstream, kinship residential care and independent foster care.
Given that the number of children and young people within the Trust’s LAC service has been increasing over the last few years, “permanency options” are being adopted to try and reduce this trend.
This is achieved through: “adoption and residence orders where it is assessed that permanency promotes the ‘best interests’ of the child when family options have been robustly explored and ruled out,” the spokesperson explained.