TACT CEO Andy Elvin has written a blog for Community Care in which he criticises the involvement of private-equity firms in the care system and echoes the calls from children’s services directors’ for wholesale change.
“We are in a dystopian present, where a few private equity (PE)-backed providers own an outsized share of non-LA children’s homes and foster care capacity. They have not done this by developing and nurturing provision or risking their own money.”
“This plunder of the public purse must end now. I, alongside others, am proposing to the care review an alternative model, without private equity involvement, that removes the transactional nature of the current arrangements, gives surety of costs to LAs, and allows us to work together to ensure sufficiency. We can then all concentrate on providing stability, lifelong relationships and great outcomes for children.
We should be investing taxpayers’ money in our children’s futures. The current ‘care market’ is simply a trough for the snouts of the offshore private equity brigade.”
TACT is a founding member of Fairer Fostering Partnership, a group of not-for-profit fostering agencies in the UK that believe excessive profit has no place in the care of vulnerable children.
You can read the blog in full here.
