Introduction

A recent report by the What Works for Children’s Social Care (2022) group has highlighted that 51% of children and young people (CYP) in England who have lived in residential care were classified as NEET status (not in education, employment or training). On average such children have 6.7 placements in residential care and just under a quarter (24%) have at least one conviction whilst in care. The life chances of care experienced young people living in residential care tend to be significantly lower than non-care experienced children, and inconsistent support appear to be increasingly normalised.

A wide range of service providers now dominate social care more generally in the UK, with the private or independent sector dominant and increasingly emerging as a ‘shadow state’ for which ‘transparency and genuine accountability are lacking’ (Williams, 2012: 3). For example, the private sector now supplies around 84 per cent of early years support including nursery care in England. This contrasts with France and Germany where the proportion of private sector providers is 4 and 3 per cent, respectively (Hall and Stephens, 2020).

Foster and residential care provision are again similarly dominated by the for-profit sector, with an oligopoly of a small number of large providers monopolising much provision (Williams, 2012; Berg, 2019). Despite this, the Competition and Markets Authority (2022) has reported that there is still a lack of placements available for children in care. Moreover, young people in England continue to be placed far from their home locations (especially to the North West) and extensive debt is carried by some residential service providers which risks any such providers sudden exit. This report has also highlighted that high profits are rarely invested for the recruitment or training of support staff and that changes in legislation have meant that children of 16 and 17 years of age increasingly ‘face abandonment and adultification at levels previously unseen’ (Bennett et al, 2024: 3).

This article looks at the ongoing marketisation and fragmentation of residential care, and the negative impact this is having upon many care-experienced young people. Among other issues, it considers the lack of meaningful support often available for young people and the narrow focus on business-led interventions, profiteering and reacting to crises within residential care provision and other sectors of welfare.

Marketisation, fragmentation and risk in social care

Until the 1980s the vast majority of social care services were owned and regulated by local authorities. Whilst flawed and often bureaucratic, this locally-based system permitted the possibility of consistent planning in the delivery of social support and provided clearer links to professional support including the then generic social service departments (Petrie, 2015; Jones, 2019). However, core legislation introduced – notably the Children Act 1989 and NHS and Community Care Act 1990 – initiated the swift expansion and dominance of a multitude of private sector service providers in care. The subsequent Labour government of 1997 replaced Compulsory Competitive Tendering with Best Value in 1999, and then Social Value in 2012. Each initiative continued the rapid growth of numerous private sector suppliers and significantly reduced state-owned and voluntary sector provision for young people. For example, from a small proportion of ownership up to the 1980s, by 2023 2,450 (85 per cent) children’s homes were owned by private companies operating in England. Local authorities now own 333 homes (11.5 per cent) and the voluntary sector comprises 97 homes (3 per cent) (Ofsted, 2023).

Among other questions, criticism has ensued about the high transaction costs related to privatisation in social care, alongside the dispersal of professional and service provider responsibilities, and the limited regulation of a myriad of independent providers. Priority has subsequently also been given to funding young people assessed with higher-level needs, which generate greater returns to providers (Parton, 2014; Ioakimidis and Wylie, 2023). Attention has been drawn also to significant geographical disparities, with some London boroughs now without any children’s residential homes, and the North West having 514 homes in 2011 (Williams, 2012; Jones, 2019).

By focusing on the association between risk and care, Webb (2006) has detailed how ethical issues such as poverty, substantive support, meaningful care, have become ever more marginalised. Indeed, the crisis and risk-averse model of care can struggle to meaningfully accommodate the support needs of many people, with priority instead given to surveillance and micro-managing service users ‘in the open circuits of community control’ whilst providing ‘little more than a safety-net operation for marginal populations’ (ibid: 182-185). Moreover, alongside safeguarding and punitive interventions which can appear to carry ‘soft fascist’ overtones (Coleman and Mullin-McCandish, 2021: 1-5), a culture of blame can quickly take hold within fragmented welfare sectors (Webb, 2006: 70-78).

Impact of fragmented care on children and young people

According to a recent report by Health Equity North, preventative services in the North of England for young people have been ‘hollowed out’ and local authorities now remain ‘at the mercy’ of private care providers supplying core provision such as residential services (Bennett et al, 2024: 8). Williams (2012) argues that residential care in England costs over a billion pound per year, yet, according to a Parliamentary Inquiry at the time, the most vulnerable young people receive ‘low standards of care’ despite an annual cost of around £200,000 for each child. During 2023 there were 83,000 children in care in England which represented a fifteen-consecutive-year high, but national inequalities reveal the North of England and specific parts of the North West shouldering disproportionately high rates of intervention from social services. According to the Health Equity North report these trends unequivocally link to the impact of poverty and structural inequality, which among other factors, has helped lead to ‘a vicious circle of ever-greater spend on children-in-care, at the expense of investment in effective, compassionate support for families in need’ (Bennett et al, 2024: 8-9).

Built around quasi-market-based logic, support services in social care can struggle to accommodate the distinct needs of young people. Priority instead can be given to commissioning frameworks, standardisation, shareholders, and achieving economies of scale above other concerns in order to achieve economic viability and survival in fiercely competitive and unstable markets. The Independent Children’s Homes Association (2022) nevertheless argue that local authorities have largely disengaged from running care homes since scandals about child abuse throughout the 1990s came to light. For young people these economic and political forces can restrict or undermine the quality and suitability of provisions. Moreover, the meeting of government targets has also generated an equally corrosive culture of ‘short-termism’, which pushes against any precedence to provide longer-term stability for young people (Williams, 2012: 13).

Criminalisation of young people and disadvantaged asylum-seeking children

One notable consequence of private sector dominance and service fragmentation in care has been the criminalisation of many young people in residential care. The Howard League for Penal Reform (2016), for example, has detailed how ‘looked after’ children in private sector dominated residential care are now significantly more likely to be criminalised than other children. Around twenty per cent of 16 and 17-year-olds in children’s homes have been involved with the police and subsequently criminalised, a rate just under 20 times higher than non-looked after children. The Howard League report also discovered evidence to suggest that many staff employed by private providers were regularly too keen to call out the police regarding children’s behaviour, often for quite trivial reasons. This was often due to staff shortages or a lack of training or competence to offer appropriate support to young residents. Consequently, the police are regularly being asked to cover unmet needs due to a long term ‘social care deficit’, and the criminalisation of children means that children’s life chances are likely to be significantly reduced further. The findings also suggest a tipping point for residential care-experienced young people around the age of 13, when society’s sympathy evaporates and rather than receive substantive support young people are pushed into the criminal justice system. The report concludes that rather than criminalise young vulnerable people, government, agencies and children’s homes ‘need to focus on providing the care and support these children desperately need’ (Howard League for Penal Reform, 2016: 3).

The Prison Reform Trust (2017: 1-4) has co-produced a study with young people who had fallen into the criminal justice system. Importantly, this report highlights that most children in care do not get into trouble with the police. Despite this, children who live in residential care – and especially teenage boys – are at a much greater risk of offending and entering the criminal justice system or custody. The study discovered that regular changes in who looks after young offenders in care has a detrimental long-term impact. Key changes which can have a negative influence often relate to residencies and location, schooling, and who provides emotional and practical support – including support workers, relatives, social workers, and friends – can also be key. The report discovered that half of the 1,000 children in custody in England and Wales were care-experienced, and recommended solutions included providing early support for children and families at risk, improving joint work between professionals and improving support, the quality-of-care placements and mentoring for young people. Recently, the Independent Children’s Homes Association has again criticised the widespread criminalisation of care-experienced young people. They added that local residents regularly campaign to prevent new children’s homes from opening. Often resident opinions will range from scepticism to open hostility, but this is typically based on an unfounded yet increasingly commonplace assumption that children in residential care are criminals rather than vulnerable people in need of urgent care and support (Woodhead and Unia, 2022).

Service fragmentation and marketisation can affect all service user groups, but there is evidence to suggest that minoritised children are especially vulnerable to instability and neglect. Humphris and Sigona (2019a: 6-15), for example, argue that limited local authority budgets and financial austerity have helped to significantly undermine the support of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children (UASC) and other ethnic minority groups. Tension persists between the state’s wish to police borders whilst also outsourcing provisions to other agencies, especially independent providers. Typically for UASC this leads to a business-orientated reliance upon cheaper out-of-county residential placements which can mean that local authorities are able to disseminate their responsibilities elsewhere and generate spatial distance from many of their immediate duties. Relatedly, Humphris and Sigona contest that tension also persists between children’s rights and those of family members including parents, with each separated by the state through its increasingly reductive and ever more binary focus on administratively and legally managing risk. Consequently, children’s rights are discursively understood through forms of process-driven ‘bureaucratic capture’ which promotes a view of UASC parents or guardians as representing a source of risk or danger (Humphris and Sigona, 2019b). The consequences can include already traumatised children being scattered around the country with few if any immediate family members nearby and irregular or limited substantive formal care provided.

Conclusion

Numerous studies have highlighted that young people in residential care typically require long-term stability and consistent support to meet their emotional, physical care, social and identity-related needs (for example, Prison Reform Trust, 2017; Bennett et al, 2024). With multiple and frequently changing service providers now present within fields of social care these fundamental needs are increasingly unmet. Some reports have also highlighted that natural parenting is no longer viewed as an ideal or even aspiration by professionals for many families who come to their attention. From their report for Health Equity North, Bennett et al (2024) make a series of recommendations for CYP in care which include:

• Strengthening fragile systems including by introducing measures to regulate private profiteering
• Filling in gaps for older children and those leaving care
• Tackling poverty and racism as a structural determinant of entering care and experiencing neglect
• Building sustainable prevention strategies and offering material support to families involved with Children’s services
• Creating a National Framework and data strategy including to manage data gaps

Further challenges for residential care experienced young people can be faced due to the now prevalent shortage of reliable staffing within a transient care sector compromised by low pay, poor employment rights, casualisation, staff churn and work intensification. Moreover, core professional roles such as social work – which traditionally has claimed to offer meaningful long-term support and advocacy for young people – appear themselves to have become part of the problem. This is especially as their focus ever more remains placed on regulation, bureaucracy and managing risk, as well as carefully monitoring and controlling parents living in poverty rather than supporting them (Featherstone et al, 2018; Morris et al, 2018). There are of course more dynamics at play, but in sum it appears abundantly clear that many of the current systems of support and governance for social care remain deeply flawed and are not working for many young people in residential care. A clear plan of action and resources to limit aggressive marketisation and fragmentation in core services such as residential care continues to remain an urgent priority.