The recent BBC documentary Teens in Care highlighted a number of important issues facing young people in the care system. However, it also shied away from some difficult and knotty questions.
One of these pertains to the issue of profit-making in private residential care. It was revealed in the documentary that the profit-making children’s home it featured was charging the local authority £6,000 per week to accommodate and support one of the three teenagers living there. The home’s manager said the money was spent on staffing, a psychologist’s support, weekly spending money, clothing and holidays for the young person. The young person concerned, Karl, spoke mainly positively of his experiences in the home. However, there was an unasked question of how much of the £6,000 constituted profit for the company. A recent Competition and Markets Authority report found that children’s home providers in England, Scotland and Wales averaged over 20 per cent profit margins between 2016 and 2020. How else could the £6,000 paid for Karl’s care be used to support Karl, now and in the future, if no profit were involved?
An argument has been made that private providers of care placements are simply filling a gap arising from a lack of residential and foster homes for children and young people in care. As is explored in our new edited collection, The Future of Children’s Care, the backdrop to the current difficulties in the English care system is the austerity economics of successive Conservative governments. Huge decreases in local authority budgets forced them to make savings by cutting services. Among the first in line were local authority-run children’s homes – a relatively expensive resource – with private children’s homes largely taking their place.
What was an initial cost-saving measure has now become financially disastrous for local authorities. Increasing care numbers – themselves partly the result of Conservative governments’ welfare cuts – have seen increasing profits for private providers while children and young people are frequently placed at distance from their home areas, separated from siblings and bereft of the support they need. Yes, there are good private providers, but a system that encourages profiteering from the provision of care to children and young people in state care is part of the problem, not the solution.
Karl spoke of being ‘on independence’, a process of equipping him with skills around shopping, cooking and budgeting in preparation for the state washing its hands of responsibility for him on his 18th birthday. This ‘independence’ discourse is oft repeated in the care system, as if the capacity for self-reliance is both the chief aim of state care and an unquestionably desirable outcome for young people in and of itself. No mention was made in the programme of the value of creating conditions for young people leaving care by which they are established within networks and communities of interconnected, meaningful relationships, in which they are supported and encouraged to be interdependent. For young people who have experienced the trauma and challenges of non-existent or extremely dysfunctional and damaging relationships, too often followed by very mixed experiences within the care system itself, the idea of ‘independence’ as currently constructed is an extremely daunting, if not truly frightening, prospect.
The current Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Children, Families and Wellbeing (the ‘Children’s Minister’), Claire Coutinho MP, appears in the documentary and seemed at least superficially informed of some key themes and challenges in the current care system. Notably, though, she rhetorically distanced her government from its responsibilities towards children and young people who need state care and support. After repeating some of the main planks of the recent MacAlister Review of children’s social care system in England – increasing fostering availability and encouraging more kinship care, alongside the often repeated call for ‘love and stability’ in the care system – Coutinho ended by saying, “We want to try and help with that.”
The government has clear legal, as well as moral, responsibilities towards children and young people in state care. Article 20 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child states that a child deprived of its family environment ‘shall be entitled to special protection and assistance provided by the State’. The government simply does not have the luxury of philanthropy, of ‘wanting to help’. It has a legal and moral duty to do so, as it has had during the last 13 years the Conservative Party has been in power. It remains to be seen how long Countinho, extraordinarily the tenth Conservative ‘Children’s Minister’ since 2010 and the fourth since 2022, will last in her job – she is rumoured to be in line for a ‘promotion’ in a forthcoming Sunak government reshuffle. The lack of stability in this office since 2010 speaks to the Conservative Party’s failure to consistently prioritise the wellbeing of children and families who use children’s services, despite the often-lofty rhetoric its ministers have deployed.
The documentary ended with Karl smashing up his old bedframe in the yard of his children’s home as he prepared to leave and move to ‘independence’. “It was broken anyway,” he said. Six thousand pounds per week and Karl’s last nights in state care were spent in a broken bed. It is a sadly fitting symbol. Will a future Labour government have the courage to give the system the investment it needs, while reforming it so it can genuinely meet the needs and wishes of children and families?
Robin Sen is Lecturer in Social Work at the University of Edinburgh and a qualified social worker who has practiced in statutory child and family social work in Scotland. He is also a qualified practice educator. Christian Kerr is a social worker and Lecturer in Social Work and Social and Community Studies at Leeds Beckett University.
Listen to Robin and Christian talk about their book, The Future of Children’s Care, in this episode of the Transforming Society podcast.
The Future of Children’s Care edited by Robin Sen and Christian Kerr is available on the Policy Press website. Preorder here for £16.99.
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