Kathy Evans , NYAS Director of Policy & Influencing, responds to a new BBC Report: Why illegal children's homes are being paid up to £2m per child by councils
The BBC and Investigative Bureau of Journalism have published yet more important and shocking revelations about the continued proliferation of ‘careless’ accommodation for children and young people in care. These revelations sound yet more alarm bells for the so-called ‘market’ for looking after our nation’s children – and what is actually happening within it. The fact that a legislative ban on the use of such accommodation for under 16s was only prompted by previous investigative journalism by the BBC, in 2019, is itself damning. But why is it happening even moretoday, despite such apparently decisive government action to outlaw it over 5 years ago?
Our first and most important reaction to this news reporting at NYAS is one of unconditional empathy and outrage for the young people who are stillpaying the very real price of this ongoing, and frankly unforgivable, systemic failure by adult society to protect and care for them all properly. We cannot say as a society, and especially not within the children’s services sector, that we didn’t know it was this bad, when the alarm bells have been ringing for more than a decade.
Age and childhood
Every child needs a home, safety and security, love and belonging, good health and a sense of purpose. This is the nature of all childhoods, they are the pre-requisite conditions for growth and development, not just (but perhaps especially) for children who find themselves in need of state care.
It is important to remind ourselves in this context that under both our domestic and international legal definitions a child is anyone under the age of 18. NYAS has always been clear about our unwavering commitment to every child’s right to safe, stable, caring (ideally loving) homes in which to live and grow through their childhoods, to begin to heal from their traumas, no matter what age they are when they come into our collective care, or how they came to be in need of it. This week’s reporting shows how far we are from that ambition on so many levels, but especially for children aged 16 and 17.
Why the ban and ‘careless’ accommodation standards were never the right answer
At NYAS we neveraccepted the government’s ‘solution’ in 2019, of banning unregulated care for under 16s, while regulating it for 16 and 17 year olds. It effectively meant that the very same place that they said should be outlawed for a 15 year-old could suddenly become the right option after their next birthday. Our advocates too often hear from children facing an unwanted end to their foster family, or registered children’s home place at 16 because they’re too old to stay in a ‘children’s’ care setting; old enough to move on to ‘semi-independence’. Sometimes they’ve even been told that the home they’ve been happy living in is now needed for someone younger who needs it more – as if they are overstaying in an oversubscribed hotel.
Every child is of course unique and their needs and circumstances are diverse. Some teenagers may actively resist ‘alternative family’ care options and feel they are ready for life on their own terms in their mid-teens, and we should always listen to them and think seriously about what that means for our responsibilities as their collective parents. There are indeed some great, safe, caring providers of post 16 accommodation operating around the country, and there are also councils who have listened, thought, planned and invested in various types of high quality supported transitional settings for young people who really are ready for it. We are in no doubt that those are not the kind of places the BBC investigation reveals.
Few children want the type of hostel accommodation that this investigation highlights, and very few social workers or placement officers would claim these are the best options for them either. Bad placement choices were not the reason this problem grew in the first place, it was always about lack of any other choice. Use of ‘illegal’ settings was only really happening as a desperate last resort that had ‘sprung up’ outside of the official ‘marketplace’ for regulated care; and it only sprung up because care commissioning had failed to ensure enough properly registered and regulated options.
The problem was wrongly diagnosed in 2019, so the prescribed ‘treatment’ (ie the ban and new regulation of a newly legitimate market) simply could not cure it. The proliferation of unregistered and unregulated settings was the direct consequence of long-term commissioning failure: their continued use and existence today is a symptomof intractable, unaddressed market failure.
Why care markets can’t work
If the state is to be a ‘good enough’ parent to a child when their birth parent just can’t be, the state must actually care about that child in a way that’s at least similar to how parents care. Care is a verb, not a product. Bedrooms and buildings can’t care, only human beings can. Care is made up of behaviours and attitudes, thoughtfulness and feelings: an amalgum of being relentlessly interested and curious, passionate, committed, persistent and excited about the person you care about, even when they don’t appear to reciprocate; even when they push back against that care. This earthy, complex ‘doing word’ – caring – can’t be packaged up, segmented and put out to tender in a competitive market.
If care is not a product, so it follows that you can’t buy ‘15 minute slices’ of it, or weeks of it, or single beds of it, and still expect to purchase a real, meaningful, lasting, caring human relationship. New market procurement structures, specifications, products and unique selling points, regulations, innovations, bans, sanctions, profit caps and pricing structures, are the equivalent of Einstein’s famous quote: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
The failed market approach to care must be recognised as part of any accurate ‘diagnosis’ of many of the biggest problems in the care system: problems of rising care bills for councils; children sent far from home, school and community; the deeply worrying explosion in Deprivation of Liberty orders for children; the continued use of more ‘illegal’ placements even after government banned it. Turning care into a market, and letting misplaced ‘market forces’ loose within it, created(or at least exacerbated) all of these problems. We can’t cure them, therefore, with a better market approach.
A child-centred definition of care
No child who has experienced the transformational effect of genuine, caring human relationships within the care system (of whom we know many) will ever put that experience down to a service specification, the provider type, the pricing tariff, the brand or registration category that brought that special person into their life. And no market tendering exercise will ever be able to buy a child the trusted human relationship they need on the day they need it in the most formative and scary moments of their young life. Markets don’t care about children, people do.
While NYAS is not, and never will be, a part of the care provider ‘market’ that so desperately needs wholesale reform, our independent advocates and champions really do care (in the ‘doing word’ sense) about every child and young person in, or leaving, care. Our charity is built on a vision that no child should ever be alone or voiceless in the care system, let alone to feel ‘like a prisoner’ in lonely, barricaded hostel bedrooms (as the BBC investigation describes from young people they interviewed). Regulated or not, that is simply not care.
Every human being who volunteers with NYAS, offering to build trusted relationships with care-experienced children and young people – whether as an Independent Visitor or Side-By-Side volunteer - knows very well that care is a verb. It’s how they feel and what they volunteer to do. And every young person we ever worked with knows what real care for them feels like when they experience it, just as they instinctively know when care is absent. We should let their voices and experiences lead us away from market thinking to find a far better way to care, together.
