Why London Needs More Foster Carers Right Now

If you have ever wondered whether London genuinely needs more foster carers, or whether that is just the thing agencies say, here is the version with the numbers attached and the sources named. The short answer is that more carers stopped fostering last year than started, and the children who needed a home did not go anywhere. The longer answer is more interesting, and it may change what you think this asks of you.

Please note: this is general information, not advice about your own situation. The figures here are correct at 25 September 2026 and come from Ofsted’s Fostering in England, 1 April 2024 to 31 March 2025 (published 26 November 2025) and the Department for Education’s children looked after statistics for the year ending 31 March 2025. Both are England-wide counts. Ofsted’s next update is due in November 2026.

More carers left than arrived

Ofsted counts every fostering household in England once a year. At 31 March 2025 there were 42,190, which is 1% fewer than a year earlier and 7% fewer than in 2021. Behind that modest percentage is some blunt arithmetic. During that year 3,050 households were approved and 4,690 stopped fostering. The number of approved foster carers has fallen from 63,890 in 2021 to 56,345, a drop of 12% in four years, while the number of children needing a family has not fallen anywhere near as fast.

There is a second figure worth sitting with. Of the 8,290 people who applied to foster in England that year, 2,050 were approved. Most of the others withdrew before the end. Some of that is people discovering the role is not for them, which is exactly what an assessment is for and a perfectly good outcome. A fair amount of it is people who would have been very good at this quietly giving up around month four, because the process went quiet on them and nobody picked up the phone. That is a recruitment failure, not a shortage of willing Londoners.

What a shortage of carers actually does to a child

When there is no foster home near enough, a child does not sit and wait. They move. On 31 March 2025 there were 81,770 children in care in England, and 67% of them, 54,820 children, were living with foster carers. Of all children in care that year, 44% were living outside their home local authority and 22% were more than 20 miles from where they used to live.

Twenty miles means something specific in London. From Haringey, twenty miles puts you well outside the M25. That is not a longer bus ride to the same school gate. It is a new school, a new GP, a new dentist, and a football club that may as well be in another country. Everything a child still had that was working gets packed into the same bags as their clothes.

London also has the least residential capacity in the country to fall back on. Ofsted’s 2025 count of children’s social care found 250 children’s homes in London offering 1,100 places between them, the fewest homes of any English region. So when a London child cannot be matched with a London foster carer, the alternative is very rarely somewhere else in London.

London is holding steadier than anywhere else, and it is still short

Here is the part that tends not to make the headline. Almost every region of England lost fostering households last year. London did not. Households with independent fostering agencies in London rose by 1%, and local authority households stayed level, the only region in England where they did not drop. Everywhere else went backwards.

That is worth saying out loud, because crisis language can leave people feeling that one enquiry could not possibly matter. It does matter. London is closer to holding its ground than any other part of the country, and holding level against rising need is still slowly losing. The Fostering Network’s reading of the same Ofsted figures is that England needs around 5,000 more fostering families. The government has committed to 10,000 more fostering places by 2029, and in May 2026 put £12.4 million into a Fostering Innovation Fund aimed at opening fostering up to a wider range of households.

Why it is harder to find foster carers in London

London’s housing is the honest reason, and it is not a small one. At the 2021 census, 57% of London households had more bedrooms than they needed, against 68.8% across England as a whole, and London had the highest rate of overcrowding of any region. Fewer spare rooms means a much smaller pool of people who assume they would qualify.

That assumption is where good carers are lost. A baby under two can sleep in a cot in your own room, so a spare bedroom is not always the requirement people believe it to be. We are actively looking for carers who want to care for babies, and a one-bedroom flat is not an automatic no. If you have already ruled yourself out over your rooms, it is worth ten minutes on the phone first. Our guide to whether you need a spare bedroom to foster goes through it properly.

The children waiting are not always who people picture

Most people imagine a small child on a doorstep with a bin bag. Plenty of the children we are asked about are thirteen or fourteen, and have been let down often enough to spend a few months testing whether you mean it. Some are brothers and sisters who will be split up if a second home cannot be found. Some are young people who arrived in the UK on their own and are learning English while their claim sits in a queue. And some are babies, usually at very short notice.

London is what makes this particular. A child in Newham who speaks Urdu at home, or a fifteen-year-old in Southwark whose entire friendship group lives within a mile of the estate she grew up on, has a far better chance of staying recognisably herself if the adult looking after her is also in London. A carer who already knows which bus goes where, and which secondary school will actually pick up the phone, is not a nice extra. It is the difference between a child changing address and a child changing everything.

What stops people, and what really does not

The reasons people give us for not enquiring sooner are, more often than not, the ones that turn out not to have mattered. It is completely normal to have questions about all of these, and none of them is a conversation stopper.

• Working. Many of our carers have jobs. It shapes which children suit your household rather than whether you can foster at all.
• Renting. A tenancy is fine with your landlord’s written permission, which matters in a city where so much of the housing is rented.
• Living on your own. Single carers are approved every year, and some of the steadiest homes we have are one adult and one child.
• Your age. You need to be 18 or over and there is no upper limit. What is being assessed is whether you can look after a child, not the year on your birth certificate.
• Money. GLF pays £479.50 a week for a child under 11 and £507.50 a week for a child aged 11 or over, per child, for as long as a child is living with you. Where a child has higher needs there is an enhanced fee, generally £100 to £200 a week on top.

We pay one fixed weekly amount that covers both the costs of looking after a child and your reward for doing it, with no one-off payments for birthdays or Christmas, because we would rather you could plan. If you want the detail, how foster carer pay works sets it out, and the common myths about who can foster covers the rest of the list.

You won’t have to do this alone

Nobody starts this knowing what they are doing, and we would be wary of anyone who claimed otherwise. You get your own supervising social worker, someone on the end of a phone at three in the morning as well as on a Tuesday afternoon, training before your first child arrives and more of it afterwards, and other GLF carers across London who have already had the week you are having. We are a small agency and we know our carers by name.

Ofsted inspected us between 21 and 25 July 2025 and rated GLF Outstanding in all three judgements. We mention it because when you are deciding who to ring, an inspection report is one of the few things you can check for yourself. There is more on what support foster carers actually receive if you want to know what a normal month looks like.

Frequently asked questions

How many more foster carers does London actually need?

No official figure is published for London on its own. Ofsted reports fostering households by region but does not publish a regional shortfall, and the Department for Education does not either. What we can say is that The Fostering Network estimates England needs around 5,000 more fostering families, and that the government is aiming for 10,000 more fostering places by 2029. Anyone quoting a precise London number is guessing. Ofsted’s next annual count is due in November 2026.

Do I need a spare bedroom to foster in London?

Not always. An older child does need their own bedroom, but a baby under two can sleep in a cot in your room, which is why we are recruiting carers specifically for babies. If you have a one-bedroom or two-bedroom flat, ring us before you assume the answer is no.

Will I be looking after a child from my own borough?

Not necessarily, and we would not promise it. GLF covers all 33 London boroughs and works with local authorities across the capital, so we will always try to keep a child within reach of their school, their friends and the people they already know. Sometimes the right match is the next borough over. What we will not treat as the easy option is moving a child out of London altogether.