Bring your suitcase, your bin liner, your dumpy bag. They’re handing out money faster than you can stuff it in a sack. All you need do is join the market in what may now be England’s most lucrative commodity. A commodity with arms and legs, hearts and brains, thoughts and feelings. Children.
Two years ago I stumbled into this issue after discovering that children in care who were being helped by a local charity I’m involved with were suddenly being whisked away, terminating the amazing progress they had been making, breaking their relationships, their sense of home, stability and security. When I began exploring why this was happening, I could scarcely believe what I was seeing: a highly lucrative trade in highly vulnerable young people. Children in “care” were being exchanged between private equity companies for £100,000 apiece. That figure is now wrong. Today they are worth far more.
A few days ago, the Financial Times published an investigation that I defy you to read with anything but open-mouthed horror. The average charge to the state by a private provider for a child in “care” is now £384,020 a year. That’s six times what Eton charges. Some providers now levy more than £1m per child per year, rising in a few cases for children with complex needs to more than £3m.
So everyone is cashing in. Alongside the big companies, which might invest in oil, gilts or crypto one day and children the next, the reporters found that “plumbers, hairdressers and Airbnb landlords with no experience in care” are opening “homes”. There might also be links to organised crime, as you can now make more money from children than you can from drugs. The police are concerned that gangs running children’s “homes” can not only harvest state money on a spectacular scale but also harvest highly vulnerable young people, who can be recruited and exploited. I guess you could call that vertical integration.
While there is a shortage of provision in the south of England, there’s a glut in the north-west: Lancashire has 17 places for every local child needing care. Why? Because property is cheaper there. Houses can be bought for a song and roughly converted. The cheapest buildings are in places where economic and community life has collapsed, high streets are deserted and facilities shuttered. Where better to send highly vulnerable children?
This is why our young people in Devon are being swept up to 300 miles across the country. A paper in the journal Child Abuse & Neglect finds a consistent association between profit-making and the placing of children outside their local authority area. It also finds that commercial provision is associated with them being moved more often, which means greater disruption and instability. Shifting children out of their home area makes them “more vulnerable to exploitation and grooming”. Yet the children with the greatest needs are often, under this system, those placed furthest from home.
Because councils, which have not been given the capital budgets to make their own provision, are so desperate to find places, they are sending children to providers who are not only unqualified but also, in some cases, unregistered. In other words, they are breaking the law by using “homes” which haven’t even met the basic requirement to register with the regulator. These are private oubliettes – places beyond easy reach of the authorities, where children can be dumped and forgotten. They might as well throw them in a pit and be done with it.
An investigation by LBC and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that in one of these illegal “homes”, two of the “care” workers had seven convictions between them when they were recruited, including four for violent offences. They persuaded a 15-year-old girl, who had been moved by her local authority in south Wales to the house in County Durham, to take so much drink and drugs that she became stupefied, then they sexually assaulted her for several hours. The local authority’s rationale for moving her to that “home”, the investigators found, was that she was “at risk of sexual exploitation”.
A report by the Children’s commissioner reveals that unregistered placements are on average even more expensive than legal ones. She estimates that 669 young people, mostly with special needs, including some of preschool age, are now in unregistered “homes”. In reality the figure is probably much greater, as many are likely to have fallen off the records altogether.
While in France only 5% of places are run for profit, in England, the FT tells us, the figure is 84%. The reason is simply stated: ideology. Successive governments have failed to provide local authorities with the capital needed to house children themselves because they think public is bad and private is good: the foundational belief of neoliberalism. In reality we pay far more for a much worse service. Then we wonder why, though fewer than 1% of all children in England are in care, 62% of the people in young offender institutions have been in “care”.
In Wales, all new profit-making in this sector was stopped in April, and the practice is being phased out altogether. But in England, the government seeks only to tweak this immoral and dysfunctional system. As Hettie O’Brien shows in her book The Asset Class, when private equity delivers public services, chaos and disaster follow as night follows day. But Labour, like the Conservatives, seems ideologically committed to the model.
The issue is profit. Instead the Westminster government blames the problem on a shortage of foster carers. But as Martin Barrow, a journalist and foster carer who has specialised in this issue for many years, points out: “Foster care, children’s homes, supported accommodation and adoption are not interchangeable. Each can be the right option for different children at different times in their lives.” Children’s homes remain essential, but the government must regain ownership of them. As we’ve discovered the hard way with water, energy and railways, public ownership of public services works better and costs less.
There is no place for a “market” here. Children are not a commodity to be bought and sold. Private profit and public service are always oil and water. But if there is one service above all others that capital should never be allowed to get its filthy hands on, it is children in care.
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George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
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