Defunct charity Kids Company handed over responsibility for only 500 children to councils, despite claiming to have 36,000 beneficiaries, according to a national newspaper report.

David Simmonds, deputy leader of Hillingdon Borough Council and chair of the children and young people’s board of the LGA, is quoted in the Sunday Times as saying that councils expect to take on responsibility for about 500 children.

Simmonds is quoted as being critical of Kids Company and claiming that there was a “huge gap” between its public statements on the number of children in its care and the much lower number suggested by its records.

Kids Company has several times revised its estimates of the number of children in the charity’s care. Camila Batmanghelidjh, the charity’s founder and former chief executive, is reported in national newspapers as giving figures ranging from 6,000 to 1,700.

Batmanghelidjh has claimed that a large number of children that the charity was supporting are not captured by official statistics. 

Genevieve Maitland Hudson, a researcher and former employee of the charity, who has been openly critical of its practices, has previously publicly questioned Kids Company’s caseload. In a blog post published before the charity’s collapse, she said the charity’s claims would be unsupportable even if every one of its 650 staff was a full time key worker.

However Simmonds was reported in the Sunday Times as saying that helping even the 500 children Kids Company supported could lead to a significant cost to the taxpayer.

He said placing a child in care could cost £50,000, meaning that in a worst-case scenario, councils could face a bill of up to £25m.