CHILD CARE - PROFIT MAKING - Monbiot

Child care is big business in the USA and UK.

How can a child in care cost £281000 a year?

The wealth funds 'have councils over a barrel'

-From George Monbiot in the Guardian

'Children’s residential care, foster care and special schools have steadily been taken over – with the blessing of successive governments – by profit-making companies. '

Profit-making corporations own 83% of children’s residential care. 

Children in residential care, on average, generate £910 each of profit a week for the corporations that control them. 

Large commercial providers of children’s residential care make average profits of 19%, according to a report commissioned by the Local Government Association 

 Among the owners are the state of Qatar and the emirate of Abu Dhabi, whose care company in the UK, mostly investing in special schools, made 26.5% profits in 2022. 

 In some cases, their business model looks like that of the privatised water companies: loading themselves with debt, sucking out profits and dividends, dumping risk, and creating what could be a highly unstable system. 

Revealed: hundreds of vulnerable children sent to illegal and unregulated care homes in England

The residential care business works in many cases like this: the companies rent, buy or build houses where land and property is cheapest, then offer slots to local authorities. 

Children are sometimes moved hundreds of miles.