Kids for Profit? Private Equity and the Provision of Children’s Homes.

How can being exploited by the children’s care home industry be a good start in life for a child?

It was reported last October that the profits made by the largest children care providers were higher than expected. An organisation named the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) admitted that such ‘providers’ charged an average weekly price of £3,830 a week in 2020 to accommodate a child in a home. In 2016 the price was £2,977.

The CMA’s report is more concerned with how the children’s social care market operates than addressing whether the system actually meets children’s needs. One concern is that the private equity companies owning half of the providers might fail and exit the market. The Times reported recently that such corporate firms were located offshore in Jersey, Luxembourg and The United Arab Emirates. It is well known that the private equity business model is a risky one. It beggars belief that it has anything to do with the provision of children’s care services.

Another concern is that market pressures may further disempower councils. Such a scenario could lead to further managerial failures and erroneous decision making. Local governments are already weakened considerably by by spending cuts and the drive to erode inclusive oversight and scrutiny with consequences for decision making quality and democratic accountability.

What’s important now is to establish why more children are having to access privatised social care. I agree social inequality plays a part but the ‘market knows best’ mind set and the relentless drive to commoditised all aspects of social care are creating conditions for the disintegration of working class families and a re-institutionalisation of vulnerable children.

Does the private children’s care industry give a fig about what kind of start in life a child has? Of course not. From the perspective of those profiting from tax evasion and high returns, the more deprived, hungry, skeletal and desperate the child the better. The tragedy here is that keeping children together with their families could be achieved by funding ‘Best Start’ services, doing away with the two child tax credit limits and other Universal Credit benefit caps and sanctions not boosting the riches of dodgy comapanies by spending £3,830 of public funds each week on social care accommodation.