Care for three children cost Dorset children’s services almost £2 million in the last financial year.

Official figures show that the bill for their specialist care amounted to £1.98m - averaging £661,561 each, or £12,722 per week for each child.

The payments are part of a projected overspent of at least £9 million for the financial year which recently ended.

Because of coronavirus and an increase in suspected child cases figures for the current year are expected to be worse for local council taxpayers – unless the Government steps in with additional funding.

The payments for the three cases are shown in financial papers as ‘alternative placements’ which were not budgeted for at all at the start of the 2019-20 financial year.

Dorset Council say they are not able to discuss any of the details for fear of identifying the children involved.

In a statement a spokesman said: “Alternative Placements include secure placements and other arrangements when we are unable to find a mainstream residential or foster care placement that is able to meet the needs of the child or young person. As these are a small number of children in these placements, unfortunately we cannot provide a detailed description as this may enable them to be identified.”

It is understood that all of the placements were outside of Dorset with specialist carers offering high-end therapeutic help in live-in facilities, all with high levels of staffing.

The council says that it has found itself having to deal with having more children in its care than anticipated at the start of the financial year – many with expensive private providers.

It authority has been unable to recruit enough foster carers within Dorset to help tackle the shortfall or routine placements, despite employing a specialist agency to help recruitment. It currently has another campaign underway to find more local foster carers.

Some existing foster carers had been offered the chance to train to help with more challenging children and young people but the take up was lower than anticipated.

The latest available published figures, which go to the end of January, show the £64.2 million start of year children’s services budget expected to end the financial year at £73.24m.

Most of the overspend, £7.87m, is attributed to care and protection work with families and most of that is being spend on placements for Dorset children out of the county because it has no specialist provision of its own, having shut its remaining two children’s homes.

A break-down of around 170 children in external placements shows that the authority budgeted £3.27m for 81 independent fostering agency places, but ended up paying for 103 at a cost of £4.78m; 37 residential care places were budgeted for at a cost of £5.86m but the council ended up paying for 49 at a cost of £8.95m. The biggest percentage overspend was for high cost supported accommodation where just six places were budgeted for at a cost of £800,000, but 16 were used at a cost of £2.04m.

In all external placements amount to £18.13m, over budget by the start of year estimate by £7.82m.

Despite the aim at the start of the year of reducing the number of Dorset children in the care of the local authority numbers actually rose from 427 in April 2019 to 470 at the end of December 2019. The latest report suggests that numbers have continued to rise.

In the coming financial year, which started in April, the council has put an extra £10.25m into the children’s directorate, which sets aside more than £835,000 for a growth in the number of children in the care of the council – although one prediction has said that the numbers in care could increase to 510, adding around £3.6m per year to its costs.