Hi NanaNina, I know I am going a bit off beam here, but just wanted to balance the argument out a bit about IFA's having grown up in a fostering household, my parents fostered for the LA, worked as a Social Worker in an LA and an IFA. I initially struggled morally in working for an IFA because of the profit form childcare issue bugged me.
I can too recall a child I worked with placed in south wales when the home LA was in the south east. These days it is particularly rare for children to be placed hundreds of miles away from their home LA, unless there is significant need, often this happens now when children leave childrens homes in an areas they have settled in. There is a duty on LA's and IFA's to match according to need, not mention performance indicators to deter LA's placing a long way away from their borough. When you look at inner city boroughs and leafy affluent la's such as Surrey (sweeping generalisation I know!) they have difficulty recruiting foster carers due to either a high amount of social housing and homes without spare rooms and high cost of housing and people not affording houses with spare rooms... so in many instances they are forced to place out of borough in any event.
My comment about receiving referrals from different LA's was more about, for example, you could live in Hackney and therefore receive referrals for children from Waltham Forest, Islington, Haringey, Enfield, tower hamlets. In these instances carers are often able to maintain contact with family, maintain the same schools and keep to the same support services and appointments that have always been in place.
Currently IFA's are no longer a last resort, LA's cant meet the need for good foster carers. If the choice were to split a sibling group of 4 across three foster placements or place together with one IFA carer they will usually keep siblings together. Further, IFA's offer more specialist provisions such as a greater capacity for parent and child placements, remand placements.
Regarding the cost issue. This is, in many cases, a myth. I am not saying there are no unscrupulous agencies purely motivated by profit. In my experience the majority make decisions based on childrens needs and will forgo their profit on occasions when it's needed. Local Authority's cannot operate as efficiently as IFA's and they are not as expensive as we are often led to believe. Their fee to a LA accounts for all of the 'on costs', so that fee pays the carers , pays their SSW, pays the administration, pays the other staff (very few tiers of management), utility bills, office rent/motgage, stationary, IT systems, training for carers and staff etc.... it pays for the whole fostering service. I have it on good authority from a number of LA's that they cannot provide a fostering service for a comparable fee, largely due to the inefficient or wasted resources within LA's.