Why the Foster Carer Crisis Is Bigger Than Recruitment
A Corporate Parenting Question We Can’t Keep Ignoring
The government’s latest pledge to secure 10,000 new foster care places in England has been widely covered. Ministers are talking about national recruitment campaigns, changing rules to open fostering up to people previously excluded, and putting money behind the push to bring more carers forward.
This focus on recruitment — and, to a lesser extent, retention — is necessary. But it is not enough. At FAC, we believe the national conversation is missing a far more uncomfortable point: the role of the state itself, as corporate parent, in driving the foster care crisis.
Recruitment Isn’t the Whole Story
Charities and sector bodies have consistently highlighted recruitment and retention as major challenges. There are now fewer foster carers than children entering care, and more households are leaving fostering each year than joining.
The government’s current strategy focuses on removing “outdated barriers” to becoming a foster carer and offering financial incentives. These steps matter. But they fail to address two critical questions:
Why are so many foster carers leaving?
Why are more and more children being removed from their families in the first place?
Over the last ten years, the number of children in care has increased by approximately 17% nationally. When the state removes more children from their birth families, the demand for foster placements inevitably grows. Any serious response to the foster care crisis must therefore examine what is driving this escalation — not just how to manage its consequences.
The Missing Conversation: Corporate Parenting Failure
Under the Children Act 1989, local authorities are legal corporate parents for children in their care. This carries duties to safeguard children, promote their welfare, and secure stability and permanence.
Yet in many areas, these duties are not met with the seriousness, consistency or accountability we would expect of any parent.
Consider the realities on the ground:
Recruitment campaigns are repeated year after year, yet fostering numbers continue to fall — suggesting deeper structural problems than awareness or outreach alone.
Foster carers often leave not primarily because of allowances or cost-of-living pressures, but because of inadequate support from social workers and fostering services, poor communication, and unmanageable bureaucracy.
In some local authorities, weak planning and overstretched systems push carers to the brink, undermining placement stability and increasing burnout.
It is striking that many acts or omissions by corporate parents — the very professionals charged with protecting children — would, if committed by a natural parent, meet thresholds of neglect or harm that could justify child removal. Yet institutional failure of this kind rarely attracts the same public scrutiny or consequences.
Why is it acceptable for a council repeatedly judged “inadequate” to continue to hold parental responsibility for hundreds of children, while an ordinary parent can lose theirs after a single failure? If the threshold for state intervention is justified as protecting children, why are comparable standards not applied to the state when it becomes the parent?
The Real Driver: A System That Removes Rather Than Supports
The foster care crisis is not only about carers leaving; it is also about why so many children are entering care at rising rates.
Too often, families do not receive adequate early help or sustained support. A child protection framework that intervenes late, offers fragmented assistance, and prioritises removal over repair increases the likelihood of children being taken into care — despite the well-documented risks associated with family separation.
This is not inevitable. There is strong evidence — from Sure Start to family support hubs — that early, meaningful, and relational support can prevent family breakdown and reduce the need for care proceedings.
If corporate parents invested more in:
early-help services,
intensive family support,
parent education and in-home safety planning,
we would see fewer children removed, fewer foster placements required, and far less pressure on an already fragile system.
Accountability Must Match Power
FAC believes policymakers need to look beyond recruitment slogans and ask harder questions:
What structural failures are driving the increase in children being removed from their families?
What accountability mechanisms protect children once they are removed into state care?
Should a local authority judged to be inadequate be allowed to continue acting as corporate parent without meaningful external oversight or intervention?
This is not a semantic debate. It is about rebalancing the national conversation from “finding more carers” to fixing the systems that fail children, families, and foster carers alike.
Conclusion
Government pledges to recruit 10,000 new foster care places are welcome — but they are, at best, a partial response to a deeply structural problem. Unless we address why foster carers leave, why local authority support is so often inadequate, and why the state is removing increasing numbers of children into care, the crisis will persist.
Until we confront the systemic failures of corporate parenting — and invest in families, not just placements — the foster care shortage will not be solved.
It will simply be rebranded.