Chapter 15 — THE PER DIEM

I want to put the money in one place so that it is clear, because when people hear *he ran homes for foster kids* they picture something either saintly or cartoonishly evil and it is neither.

The Commonwealth pays a per diem.

It is a daily rate, per child, per bed. It arrives whether the child is happy or not, whether the staff are checked or not, whether the complaint log has one entry or a hundred.

It stops for exactly two reasons: the bed is empty, or the licence is gone.

Larkfield Care Group billed the Commonwealth $6.4 million in the last full financial year.

Daniel drew $310,000 as managing director. Gareth Moody was paid $74,000 a year as compliance officer, which for eleven site visits in six years works out to about forty thousand dollars per visit.

We are not rich people, by the way. That is worth saying. We have a nice house in a small town and I drive a four-year-old car and my husband drew a good salary from a company that provided a service the state genuinely needed and could not provide itself.

There is no yacht in this story.

That is what made it work for nineteen years.

The thing he was protecting was not a fortune. It was a *rate*. It was the difference between fifty-eight beds and forty-one beds. It was a business staying the size it was.

And to protect it, sixty-one children were told that the thing they had reported had not occurred.

I have gone back and forth on whether my husband is a monster and I have landed somewhere that satisfies nobody, including me.

He never once looked at that spreadsheet and thought *I am hurting children*.

He looked at it and thought *occupancy*.

That is worse. I have decided that is worse, and I will defend it: a man who enjoys hurting children is a horror and there are not many of them. A man who has stopped being able to see children as anything but a line on an occupancy report is a system, and there are a great many of those, and the system pays a per diem.