I had first-hand experience of the residential care system for children in the 1960s and worked with children in care in a number of settings until I retired in 2007, witnessing changes including the privatisation started in the Thatcher era. Initially, good childcare workers set up homes to provide needs-led services without local authority bureaucracy. As venture capitalists saw profits to be made and assets to be stripped, they moved in by buying many small providers and establishing new homes in areas with cheap labour and property.
There have been previous promises from government like those coming in the wake of Josh MacAlister’s report (Children to be housed closer to family in overhaul of England’s social care system, 2 February). If driven from the centre, they will meet the fate of previous initiatives.
A teenage girl attending a local college from a home about 70 miles from her family was informed that a new policy meant she had to move back into her home area. I was her advocate. At her case review, her social worker, supported by the supposed “independent” reviewing officer (who arrived in the social worker’s car), asked why she did not want to return and was told there were strong personal reasons, but she did not want to confide these to her social worker. The next day, the young woman telephoned me because her social worker was coming in two days’ time to collect her and take her to her home area. I advised her to email a letter to the director of social services, copied to the national inspectorate. Thankfully, this worked.
Where children in care need to live depends on their circumstances, and while most should be near to their home area, some will opt to move away and start afresh. One size does not fit all.
Roy Grimwood
Market Drayton, Shropshire
• The government’s response to the MacAlister review of children’s social care in England is little more than a procrastinating Post-it note on which someone has scribbled “low priority – no further action”. Sadly, this matches the experience of those children and families receiving social care as well as the staff working in the childcare sector. They are seen as an inconvenient nuisance, unworthy of proper care, attention or investment. They all know that the government’s offer of £200m to run pathfinder projects is a diversionary tactic to avoid undertaking the £2.6bn overhaul of the entire child social care system the MacAlister review proposed.
Here we are yet again, where government, which is the ultimate “corporate parent” for vulnerable children, avoids its parental responsibilities and offers sweets instead.
Peter Riddle
Wirksworth, Derbyshire
• If you want to shelve a problem for a couple of years, set up a review. Then, to give the appearance of doing something, announce a strategy. Two years ago, when the government announced its review into children’s social care, in a letter to the Guardian (20 January 2021) I wrote: “The last thing we need is a review that is unlikely to discover anything we do not already know. We just need the previous funding restored.” This latest government announcement confirms the fear I then expressed that this was never going to happen.
Mel Wood
Swords, County Fingal, Ireland
