Uncertainty remains on outsourcing children's services

Draft regulations on plans to change the way child protection services are delivered have been laid down in parliament, just 10 weeks after the proposals were first announced by the Department for Education.

During that short period, a broad coalition of children's organisations campaigned against the notion of local authorities being able to outsource child protection services - as well as duties in relation to children's trust boards - to private sector providers such as Serco and G4S to deliver for profit.

Their concerns were briefly allayed when the DfE published its response to the consultation and proclaimed that only non-profit organisations will be allowed to deliver child protection services.

However, details of the revised legislation reveal that profit-making companies will not be prevented from "setting up separate non-profit making subsidiary to enable them to undertake such functions", reigniting the charities' earlier concerns.

Helga Pile, national officer for social care at Unison, has accused the government of leaving the "back door open" for profit-making companies to find a route into child protection services.

"These firms could end up making a profit out of vulnerable children and their families," she says.

"There is an obvious conflict of interest, as some of these companies also run children's homes.

"It will make it difficult to know how funds will flow between their profit-making and non-profit-making arms."

Similarly, Kathy Evans, chief executive of Children England, says there must be transparency about the activities of contractors and their finances.

"Local authorities should expect full prior disclosure of any contractor's corporate relationships and should be able to specify that any surplus is reinvested in support for local children and young people.

"We fully support, therefore, the need to ensure that outsourcing, if and when appropriate, has public interests - in this case, those of children - at heart."

Unison's Pile says the new regulation could create issues with public trust, which is key to delivering effective child protection services.

"The public needs to be able to trust local child protection teams so they can feel confident to report concerns they may have about a child, and trust that if they raise a concern the service will act in the best interests of that child," she says.

However, a key concern for many within the sector is the issue of accountability.

Ray Jones, professor of social work at Kingston University, says the revised legislation takes an "unsuitable arms length" approach to services. He fears that potentially lengthy geographical distances between organisations and the communities in which they will be working could impact negatively on vulnerable children.

"There is a danger that big voluntary organisations - some of which seem quite eager to expand their business - often have their senior management quite far away and they are not embedded within their communities," Jones explains.

The DfE has said that accountability of local authorities and the role of Ofsted will be unchanged and that the inspectorate will continue to inspect all children's services and issue judgments on the council's performance in meeting its duties.

However, Jones is yet to be convinced and says Ofsted will only visit providers as part of its inspection of the local authority and not judge them on the quality of the services they provide on behalf of councils.

He adds: "The local authority would then be judged and rated on the services it is contracting and the provider of those services would not itself be rated on the quality of those services.

"The issue there is if I was a director of children's services or a leader of a council, I wouldn't want my council's rating or reputation to be determined by an organisation that only has a distant relationship with a contract.

"I think that's quite problematic in terms of accountability."

Bridget Robb, chief executive of the British Association of Social Workers, shares a similar concern and says it is unacceptable that providers themselves will not be given their own Ofsted rating.

"The government must ensure that the legal responsibility for children removed from their parents remains with the state through local government until such time as the court assigns that responsibility to another permanent carer," she says.

"Government plans to remove the requirement for Ofsted to inspect these providers and just inspect the local authority leaves these children and young people very vulnerable to the variable quality of local authority inspection and contracting regimes. This is not acceptable."

Similarly, Children England's Evans says the plan is far from being supported by the sector, citing questions about accountability and a lack of evidence underpinning outsourcing.

"Questions about fragmentation of services, accountability and procurement practice will now effectively be devolved to individual local authorities," she explains.

"While the government's response suggests that the evaluation of Social Work Practice pilots provides sufficient evidence for these proposals, this evaluation was mixed at best.

"That this is the most convincing evidence that can be cited only reinforces how scant the evidence base for outsourcing is."

OUTSOURCING PROPOSALS KEY DATES

17 April: The Department for Education published a consultation on plans to allow local authorities to outsource child protection services

30 May: The consultation closed

20 June: The DfE published its response to the consultation and revealed that only non-profit organisations will be allowed to deliver child protection services on behalf of local authorities

24 June: The DfE laid down draft regulations on the revised legislation in parliament.