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The government plans to give new duties to local authorities to monitor and police private fostering as part of next month’s Children’s Bill, Community Care has learned, writes Derren Hayes.

Children’s minister Margaret Hodge confirmed in a letter to children's organisations last week that the government hopes to issue beefed-up regulations and guidance to councils on private fostering after the bill is enacted.

Under the proposed duties:

- local authorities would be required to check a private fostering arrangement before a child is placed in it, where advance notice is given;

- to closely monitor the operation of the private fostering notification scheme locally;

- to “make all reasonable efforts” to raise awareness of the need to notify councils of private fostering arrangements.

Regulations will require councils to appoint an individual officer to monitor the effectiveness of the local authority’s notification system, to ensure that inter-agency co-operation and discharge of the new duties on private fostering become a specific function of the new Local Safeguarding Children Board, and to monitor it with inspection.

The measures will be funded through the £90 million ring-fenced grant allocated for councils in 2004/05 for improving services to safeguard children.

The measures fall short of campaigners’ calls for a new register of private foster children and carers to be set up, but Baaf Adoption and Fostering chief executive Felicity Collier said they would at least place private fostering higher up the local authority agenda.

The government will insert a “Sunset clause” into the bill which would allow it to establish a register without the need for new legislation if the reforms “do not work as well in practice as we think they will”.

However, Sir William Utting, who in 1996 carried out a review of private fostering, said there was still a need for private fostering to be regulated in the same way as local authority fostering.

“It is completely unacceptable to have a regulated system for day care, but partly regulated for children living with strangers,” he added.