The UK Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee has found that hundreds of vulnerable children in England’s care were placed for months in “illegal” homes, settings not registered with the national regulator Ofsted, due to severe shortages of appropriate, lawful residential placements, leaving no routine oversight of safety or care quality. In September 2024, about 800 children, nearly one in ten of all those in residential care, were in such unregistered homes, often far from family and for an average of six months, underlining systemic failures in planning, commissioning, and regulation. The report highlights a dysfunctional market with rising costs and limited transparency in private providers’ finances, and calls on the Department for Education to fix these issues and ensure children are placed in safe, stable, and properly regulated homes.