Privatising child protection services

Experts sound alarm over proposal from Michael Gove's department to outsource children's services to private firms. A letter signed by 37 senior social services figures and published in the Guardian says child protection is too important to be left to the 'fickleness and failings of the market.

The power to take children away from their families could be privatised along with other child protection services under controversial plans the government has quietly announced.

The proposal from Michael Gove's Department for Education (DfE) to permit the outsourcing of children's social services in England to companies such as G4S and Serco has alarmed experts. They say profit-making companies should not be in charge of such sensitive family matters, and warn that the introduction of the profit motive into child protection may distort the decision-making process.

Professor Eileen Munro, whom Gove commissioned to carry out an independent review of child protection published in 2011, said establishing a market in child protection would create perverse incentives for private companies to either take more children into care or leave too many languishing with dangerous families...

The critics say the track record of big outsourcing companies such as G4S, which was fined for overcharging on a contract to tag offenders, and Serco, which manipulated results to meet targets on outsourced NHS family doctor services, shows the dangers of introducing the profit element into vital public services.

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/may/16/privatise-child-protection-services-department-for-education-proposes

It is revealing that two of the biggest charities involved with children, the NSPCC and Action for Children, are not averse to the privatisation of child protection services and contracts being given to huge global corporations.

But then these charities feed off the government and so we can understand why they would back the government agenda.