Any day now the regulations permitting English local authorities to outsource child protection services will be confirmed. The public howl of shock and outrage at the proposals when they emerged in June has seemingly faded. The market is coming to safeguarding.
Perhaps surprisingly, Labour is not formally opposing the proposals. Last week in committee the shadow children's minister Steve McCabe delivered an astute, wide ranging critique of the regulations - the case for change was not persuasive, the risks were high, and there remained serious questions over their impact on safeguarding governance, quality and accountability.
But paradoxically, he also confirmed that Labour would not force a vote: it would wave the regulations through, with the proviso that a future Labour government will scrap them if things go wrong in future, and a somewhat feeble parting shot at children's minister Edward Timpson that it would be all his fault if it did go pear-shaped.
Here's McCabe's concluding remarks in committee:
I am not at all convinced that the Minister has made a persuasive case for the regulations. If people's worst fears are realised and these measures prove to be the route to fragmented, unaccountable, unregulated provision, riddled with conflicts of interest and dubious financial incentives, a future Government will have to repeal them. By that time, however, thousands of children might have suffered needlessly. This decision will become the Minister's legacy.
The Labour frontbench line, it is fair to say, is not shared across the party. MPs Meg Munn and Emma Lewell-Buck - both former child protection social workers - called for the proposals to be withdrawn. Neither, however, is a member of the committee (Munn says the Labour whips turned down her application). And so one of Michael Gove's last acts as education secretary will come to pass.
It's worth recalling the extent of the opposition to the outsourcing proposals earlier this year. Not only were some authoritative professional voices - including the government's own sometime social work advisor Professor Eileen Munro - highly critical, but 72,00 people signed a petition opposing it. Despite an absurdly short six week consultation period, there were 1,300 formal responses. Just 2% agreed with the proposals. There was an overwhelming endorsement of the principle that profit-making was incompatible with child protection.
To be fair to Timpson, the government did respond to public outrage: they clarified that profit-making firms would be excluded from the new arrangements, which would be in effect managed markets restricted to charities and not-for-profit firms. This was meant to allay fears that corporate outsourcing behemoths like G4S and Serco would gain a foothold.
Timpson has always maintained emphatically that the move was never about profit-making and markets but encouraging innovation in child protection practice. It helps his case that the children's minister, much more than his former boss, is widely liked and trusted. The "innovation" view is also endorsed by Alan Wood, the president of the Association of Directors of Social Services, and Isabelle Trowler, the chief social worker for children and families, both of whom are closely linked to the widely-feted "Hackney model" of social work reform.
But doubts remain. Munn argues that the government concession is not enough: the regulations will not prevent big corporates setting up a "front" charity to run safeguarding services which would then sell services (such as residential care home placements for children taken into care) back to the profit-making parent company. McCabe, notwithstanding his refusal to oppose the regulations, pointed out:
We need stronger reassurances. We have seen the model elsewhere: education companies have set up trusts to establish academies or free schools and then sold their services to those schools. What is to prevent that from happening with these plans?
Timpson claims the regulations prevent indirect profit making, which is odd as they clearly state (paragraph 7.4):
The regulations will not prevent an otherwise profit-making company from setting up a separate non-profit making subsidiary to enable them to undertake such functions.
Lewell-Buck asked who would monitor councils' compliance with the rules. Timpson replied, unconvincingly, that it would be the local authorities themselves. Further, he suggested feebly, such a scenario may never come to pass because so far, at least, no private company had shown an interest in bidding for child protection services.
The appetite among local authorities for outsourcing child protection services is unclear. Despite ministerial claims that there is huge demand, they are still unable to name more than two enthusiasts - Kingston and Richmond, and Staffordshire. There seems to be an assumption that no-one "really" wants to go down this route, and that corporates would be crazy to bid on contracts that may lay them open to such a high risk of reputational damage.
On the other hand, as Lewell-Buck pointed out, the scale of spending cuts and rapidly shrinking town hall budgets may force councils' hand:
Authorities will make efficiencies where they can, and if delegating functions provides such an opportunity, they may feel compelled to outsource services on cost grounds, even if that means breaking up a well-performing service and handing it over to an untested provider to save money. It is easy to imagine how the current financial pressures could influence local authority decisions in that way.
Why Labour did not make a stand on outsourcing child protection, which was unambiguously opposed by the public is still slightly curious. Privately, senior Labour figures argue that the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal is not exactly an endorsement of keeping child protection services in-house. Munn argues, persuasively, that an outsourced service would add an extra layer of complexity, making it harder for a council to detect or respond to failing services.
The last Labour government started the outsourcing ball rolling on children's safeguarding when it introduced pilot projects to enable social workers to set up professional practices outside the authority. It looks like the next one won't be hurrying to arrest its momentum.
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