Travel expenses

Your basic maintenance allowance is designed to cover the day-to-day travel costs of looking after a child or young person. This includes taking your foster child to:

• School activities, like after-school clubs or discos
• Leisure activities, like social clubs, dance classes, Scouts or Brownies
• Appointments with doctors
• Appointments with dentists where the journey is under 20 miles each way
• Accident and emergency (A&E)
• Holiday or day-trip activities, like swimming, theme parks or bowling
• Visit their friends
• Meals out
• School trips under 2 miles for children under 8 years old
• School trips under 3 miles for children aged 8 or over

When you can claim travel expenses

You can claim expenses for some travel costs that are not covered by the basic maintenance allowance. These are called exceptional travel costs.

Examples of exceptional travel include taking your foster child to:

• Hospital or specialist healthcare appointments
• College or university open days
• Court proceedings

You can also claim for the cost of travel to:

• Fostering training courses
• Sessional worker
• Meetings about a foster placement
• Family time sessions

How much you can claim

Travel expenses are paid at the rate of 45p per mile, in line with the HMRC mileage rate.

How to claim travel expenses

To claim travel expenses, you should:

• Get the costs approved by your supervising social worker in advance, and
• Submit your claim to your supervising social worker on the Children's Provider Portal (ContrOCC)

You should submit claims for travel expenses:

• On a monthly basis. We cannot pay claims for travel older than 3 months
• Within the same financial year as the date of travel

If you're claiming expenses for the same journey for more than one foster child, you should submit a claim form for each child and split the miles travelled between the foster children. For example:

• You take two foster children to a college open day
• You travel 6 miles to the open day
• You would submit two expense claims of 3 miles each — one for each child