Regarding George Monbiot’s article (Horrific, unregulated, and very profitable. The companies making cash from England’s children in care, 5 June), several years ago, as a newly elected councillor, I was shocked by the high cost of placing children in private residential care. When I discussed this with friends and family, their reaction was largely one of disbelief that this had been allowed to persist.
This situation highlights a widespread “robber baron” mentality that has been allowed to develop under the guise of the presumed efficiency of the private sector. Too often, this has become an opportunity for significant profit extraction from the delivery of crucial public services. As highlighted in Monbiot’s article, the adoption of such a model in the care of some of society’s most vulnerable is especially distressing and underscores the need for prompt policy reform. However, this is not a recent development, and substantive action from the government has yet to materialise.
Nevertheless, there are examples of encouraging developments, with some local authorities beginning to re-establish their own children’s homes. Unfortunately, the severe ongoing financial pressures on many councils’ budgets present significant challenges to the widespread adoption of such good practice.
Richard Long
Solihull, West Midlands
• Thank you, George Monbiot, for bringing up the scandal of our present-day childcare provision. I write with experience of the system as a long-term foster parent whose wife was a childcare officer in the days when local authorities themselves provided for children in need. Also, for 18 years I worked for a nonprofit charity providing both foster homes and children’s homes. Prior to the massive reduction in funding, local authorities ran children’s homes themselves, sometimes sharing these with adjacent authorities.
Quality varied, but no providers were motivated by profit. In addition, the provision cost far less than today’s exorbitant amounts. This is of course always the case with outsourced provision. Being local, children were able to keep up contact with their families and lived in an area they knew. It is an absolute disgrace and brings shame on our country that the experience gained in the 1960s and 70s of how to help children survive the loss of their primary carers was thrown away as part of destructive neoliberal austerity. This has led to the present situation, in which children and their futures are sacrificed to satisfy the same mistaken ideology. The Tories initiated it, but why has Labour failed to do anything about it?
Michael McLoughlin
Wallington, London
• After trialling three agencies, and at the end of what became an adversarial vetting process, I abandoned lifelong plans of fostering to adopt during a spirited debate regarding how to treat children ageing out of care. The agency was adamant that these vulnerable children should be immediately put out on the street to keep their beds open for the next paying customer. Tallying beds and not even considering the importance of real homes, of families, is unthinkable.
It was suddenly clear: I would never actually be allowed to adopt any of these children because the agency would lose a revenue stream. They tried to say that they were really safeguarding me from a lifetime of trauma at the hands of “future monsters”.
I’ll never forget those exact words being used to describe abused children who are alone in such a cruel world. I’m haunted by the family we could have been.
Tess Lloyd Meletē
Gillingham, Kent
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