“There are serious and widespread failures that mean children and young people are not protected or their welfare is not promoted”

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Councils around the UK are spending millions of pounds on illegal children’s homes to house vulnerable young people – and there are huge questions over whether these homes are safe and appropriate.

In Oldham, near Manchester, one child with social and emotional difficulties had to sleep on a mattress on the floor. When Ofsted inspectors visited in July, they found no bed, very little furniture and one person providing care who hadn’t been vetted to work with children.

The company behind that children’s home is Great Minds Together (GMT) and was suspended for major safeguarding failures. But it popped up again, this time under the name Thriving Futures (GMT) Ltd. The clue is in the brackets! Councils are still paying it to look after kids in illegal accommodation.

Why are they illegal? By law, all children’s homes must be registered with Ofsted to ensure they are appropriate and safe, and that there are regular inspections. But councils still send hundreds of kids to live in these illegal homes every year, because there is such a shortage of legal places.

Councils have paid the companies more than £12m in the past three years, most of which relates to children in illegal accommodation.

Thriving Futures told us that Ofsted’s findings had been taken out of context, adding that the child sleeping on a mattress on the floor had chosen to sleep without a bed due to their specific needs.

The story really drove home for me how these services are failing to protect the most vulnerable. If you don’t know a child in care, you might not see it. But it’s a widespread problem. And it’s one the team are staying with – this isn’t the first time we’ve written about GMT, and I doubt it will be the last.

Each week we reveal a fascinating fact from our reporting…

There are more than 355,000 corporations registered in the British Virgin Islands, an overseas territory of Britain – that’s more than 11 times the number of people living there.

During the 1980s, local entrepreneurs and lawyers were developing the two industries on which the BVI now depends: tourism and financial services. Thanks to a coterie of local, British and US lawyers, the BVI became a global leader in selling anonymous shell companies to people looking to park assets in a tax-free location. But corruption, nepotism, and meagre accountability have festered on the BVI for decades.  

Read more here.

Our recent investigation into paid Wikipedia editing popped up somewhere interesting this week – on the Wikipedia page of the company involved, Portland Communications.

The investigation had loads of pick-up across the web. The Financial Times and The Guardian ran with it, among others. And the Chartered Institute of Public Relations warned that PR companies “must never edit any Wikipedia entry on behalf of a client, except to remove vandalism”.

But then Wikipedia itself kicked into gear. One of its army of volunteer editors added our findings to the page of Portland’s founder, Tim Allan, who now acts as Keir Starmer’s director of communications. The editor pointed out that Qatar was one of the clients benefitting from the so-called black hat edits, also known as “Wikilaundering”.

The next day, that addition was removed by another editor, who pointed out that the skulduggery we uncovered had happened after Allan had sold Portland. I think Allan was still a shareholder in Portland for some of the period we looked into, but it’s probably not the biggest part of his career and his Wikipedia page is quite short.

But if our own site isn’t enough, you can still read about our investigation on Wikipedia’s pages for Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia, the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, and, of course, Portland itself. It’s good to see the Wikiverse in action and we’re thrilled to have shed some light on an area where it does have a real weakness.

It’s not a leap to go from Wikipedia to ChatGPT, which is now using the online encyclopedia as a source. As OpenAI thinks about how to actually make money from ChatGPT, it’s introducing advertising. It made me think of a decades-old quote from the founders of Google – Sergey Brin and Larry Page – that was recently reshared by Rasmus Kleis Nielsen: “We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”

It reminded me how valuable trusted and factual information really is. Not information advancing commercial interests, but the kind of thing we do to serve the people who really need it. Going up against those big corporate interests is what gets us out of bed every morning.

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