A council faces a £2.5m bill because social workers have taken 10 children away from a mother judged unfit to have them.
The woman, named only as Rachael, wants custody of her children and has said she will “keep going” until authorities let her keep one.
The 33-year-old, who lives in Birmingham, had the 10 children by six different fathers but social workers deemed them at risk of neglect; five were adopted, four are in long-term foster care and one is awaiting adoption.
The total projected cost to the taxpayer of looking after her children – aged between 17 months and 15 years – is estimated at £1.5m, while legal fees, adoption costs and social workers’ time, bring the total to £2.5m.
John Hemming, woman’s MP in Birmingham Yardley and a campaigner for reform of the family courts, said the case illustrated the potential cost of removing children because parents often go on to have more offspring.
He said at least 500 of the 6,000-plus annual care applications involved mothers having more than one child taken away.
“You could not sit down and devise a more expensive and wasteful way of dealing with a family problem,” he said. “The legal costs involved can be almost as much as the care itself.
“In practice, if Rachael had been allowed to keep her children in a place where she was away from abusive men and where she could be supervised, it would have been much more beneficial in the long term.
“She is trying to cope and all the state is doing is hitting her over the head every time. This is a problem not just in Birmingham but throughout England.”
Rachael, who has never married, told a newspaper she intended to have her next child in Spain or Ireland to try to prevent the authorities from taking it.
“I want my kids back but I know it isn’t going to happen,” she said. “I will keep going until they let me keep one.”
Social services first placed her children on the protection register because her first partner was abusive while her second was revealed to be a sex offender.
She had further children with another partner but he left her and she was deemed unable to cope.
Birmingham City Council, which has about 2,000 children in its care, said it could not comment on individual cases or their costs but that it was spending £41m over five years on pilot programmes to offer early support to parents who are struggling to cope.
It hopes to reduce the number of children it takes into care by five per cent per year, saving the agencies involved £400m.
Cheryl Hopkins, Birmingham’s director of strategy and commissioning in children’s services, said: “Obviously we have to keep children safe, but what we know is that the outcomes for children who are in care are not good in terms of their life chances, and it costs us a fortune.”
