Two years ago a government-commissioned report laid bare the crisis affecting children’s social care in England and called for an urgent multibillion-pound overhaul to reform a system that it said was spiralling out of control.
The author of the report, Josh MacAlister, warned that a continued failure to tackle major problems in children’s services would lead to record numbers of youngsters entering care within a decade, at huge cost to families and the taxpayer.
“Change is now both morally urgent and financially unavoidable,” MacAlister said then. “We have a stark choice: keep pouring money into a faltering system or reform and invest to improve people’s lives and make the system sustainable for the future.”
MacAlister’s report was, the sector judged, a “pivotal moment in the history of children’s social care”.
Following a change of government, it seems MacAlister – now a Labour MP – may soon see many of his recommendations come to fruition as Keir Starmer’s government promises the biggest overhaul in a generation to children’s social care.
Much of the detail behind the reforms is yet to be fleshed out, but MacAlister is pleased by what he has seen so far and is optimistic about what lies ahead. “These plans show that government ministers are serious about reforming children’s social care,” he told the Guardian.
“They turn recommendations from my 2022 review into legislation that will improve lives for thousands of children and families. It’s extremely welcome.
“The plans are extensive and will shake up the entire children’s social care system. On the specific measures to tackle profiteering in children’s homes, these changes are long overdue so it’s a credit to the government that they taken action.”
In its embargoed announcement shared in advance with the media, the Department for Education focused primarily on tackling profiteering private providers, an easy win for a government with a huge piece of work ahead of it and a welcome attempt to curb the corporate takeover of children’s care.
It is an issue that has prompted many headlines, troubling many in the sector and beyond. Two years ago, an investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) pointed to providers’ high profit margins and the risk of bankruptcies.
It concluded the UK had “sleepwalked” into a dysfunctional market for children’s social care with local authorities forced to pay excessive fees for privately run services that often fail to meet the needs of vulnerable children.
Private companies were too often failing to provide the right services in the right places, the CMA said, with children too often placed in homes miles from where they live, often separated from their siblings.
The MacAlister review proposed a windfall tax on the profits of private care providers to help fund root-and-branch reform of a system under “extreme stress”, a recommendation that does not appear to have been picked up by this government.
It also called on ministers to commit to a five-year, £2.6bn programme of reform. How much this government plans to invest in a system that continues to let down England’s most vulnerable children remains to be seen. In the budget, £250m was allocated for testing new approaches in children’s social care. The sector will no doubt be hoping for more in the spending review.
