Ivo lawyer quits, Sweden closes children’s homes over register checks, municipalities must find beds overnight

• Carl-Axel Persson left Ivo in protest against the agency’s new closure policy for children’s homes.
• The cases concern deficiencies in register checks of staff, a legal safeguard meant to keep unsuitable adults away from children.
• Ivo says it weighs the harm caused by moving children against the need to protect them.
• Each closure shifts the burden to municipalities, which must secure alternative placements for vulnerable children at short notice.

A senior lawyer at Ivo, the Health and Social Care Inspectorate, has resigned after the agency tightened its response to failures in register checks at children’s homes. In a report by Sveriges Radio Ekot, jurist Carl-Axel Persson says he could not support the new line, under which homes are shut down when background-control requirements have not been met.

The conflict is narrow on paper and large in consequence. Register checks are one of the state’s basic filters for adults working around children in care; if a home cannot show that staff have been vetted, Ivo can conclude that the operation is unsafe. But closure is not an administrative note. It means children must be moved, often quickly, by municipalities that already struggle to find placements for those with complex needs, and each move breaks routines, staff relationships and schooling arrangements that the care system spends years trying to stabilise.

Ekot reports that Persson had worked with inspections of children’s homes and objected to the tougher use of closures when the underlying fault was deficiencies in register control. Ivo declined an interview but said in a written comment that it is aware closure decisions can affect children, and that any inconvenience caused by a move is weighed against the need to protect them. That wording places the agency on one side of a hard calculation: a legal safeguard that was not followed is treated as a risk serious enough to justify immediate disruption.

The practical burden falls elsewhere. When Ivo closes a home, municipalities must locate new beds, transport children and rebuild care plans, often with little room to choose among good options. A register-check failure may reveal a real danger, but the remedy can also force children into emergency placements, longer travel, new staff and fresh uncertainty. The state removes one category of risk by creating another, and the second one is carried by the child rather than the regulator.

The case also shows how Swedish child protection is being run through compliance thresholds that are easy to verify from a file. A missing or flawed register check is legible to an inspector and defensible in court. The quality of the next placement, the cost of moving a child, and the damage from another rupture are harder to count and are borne by municipalities after the decision has been made.

Persson’s resignation does not settle whether Ivo is wrong. It does show that inside the agency, at least one senior lawyer judged the new balance unacceptable. The children still have to sleep somewhere the same night a home is closed.

Källor: Sveriges Radio Ekot