The case for ending privatisation of children’s social care

I am not ideologically against private companies and I’m not even against them providing certain goods and services to the public sector.

Back in the 1980s, my dad owned a barber shop on an American airbase, making sure that the military personnel maintained their strict regulation haircuts. It was the very modest profit he earned that put food on our table, petrol in our rickety old Austin Allegro and paid for our annual holiday to Butlin's.

At the same time as my dad was shaving American heads, the UK government embarked on a programme of privatising swathes of publicly owned assets: Water and sewerage, gas and electric, the trains and busses, council houses, telecoms, airlines and car factories, to name but a few.

Most people would agree that governments needn't own certain enterprises. The state doesn’t need to own commercial airlines and our rickety old Austin Allegro didn’t need to be built in a car factory owned by ‘the people’.

But there is a wider public consensus that some things cannot and should not be run for profit. This is why the government has spent the past fourteen years trying to sell-off our NHS on the quiet. They know that the British people just won’t stomach it.

For the more contentious privatisations, those who stand to gain have worked overtime to persuade the public that this will benefit the rest of us. And lots of different tactics are deployed:

Running down public services to the point that they are so unworkable, the private sector are then hailed as the obvious and only saviour.

Or insisting that the public sector is too wasteful and bogusly claiming that private businesses are not.

Or propagating the belief that competition (rather than cooperation) drives up standards and consequently, deregulation is the only way to allow this market to flourish.

Another tactic used is to avoid the word ‘privatisation’ altogether. In many areas of social policy (housing, education, social care, etc.), that dirty word has been replaced by ‘commissioning’.

Public bodies (such as local councils) no longer deliver services themselves and instead, pay someone else to do it. Still free to those in receipt of the services but paid for from our taxes.

Under the same tactics outlined above, they have managed to persuade people that services will be better for the public once they are put out to tender.

And it has been a disaster!

My own local council has just announced that its once heralded Children’s Trust will be brought back in house by the end of the year.

The Competitions and Markets Authority have had to investigate the perverse profiteering from certain providers of independent fostering and children’s homes. Some of the aforementioned providers are owned by private equity firms. They make eye-watering amounts of profit instead of those tax pounds going directly towards support for vulnerable young people. Even the most measured among us would describe this as scandalous!

And the government’s recent deregulation now means that children in care are forced to live in caravans without any meaningful adult support. All of this points to a system that simply isn’t working for children.

One of the best things about going to Butlin's as a kid was getting to swim in the sea. Today, we have to dodge the effluence on our beaches, and we are beginning to see that profiteering and deregulation does not serve the interest of the general public. I just wonder how long it will take for the politicians to catch up?

Keith Bishop is a foster dad, youth worker, senior lecturer in social policy and programme leader for the ‘Working With Children, Young People and Families’ degree at Birmingham Newman University.