To help these lost children, throw money at marriage, not care homes
by Ann Farmer, The Conservative Woman:
THE Children’s Commissioner for England, Anne Longfield OBE, has just issued a series of reports showing how the residential social care system is ‘broken and is failing many of the most vulnerable children’.
The contents are frankly horrifying. If it was an account from pre-perestroika Eastern Europe we might not have been surprised. But it is not. It is in 21st century Great Britain that children are being ‘dumped’ in rat-infested care homes, that ‘thousands of young people are being failed by the state’, and that the children who are most at risk of falling through gaps in the system are vulnerable to becoming victims of criminal or sexual exploitation.
Additionally, the ‘growing use of private provision in the children’s care system reveals a fragmented, uncoordinated and irrational system, which allows companies with complex ownership structures to make significant profits’.
The question of which system of care provision to adopt is indeed an important one, but it can all too easily turn into a political debate about what to do with children, rather than what to do for them. Rather we should be asking an even more fundamental question: why are so many children in need of state care and how have we come to place such a low value on their wellbeing?
Recently, for the first time, the number of children in state care reached 100,000. This is an astonishing growth since 2006 when there were just over 60,000 in care. It is in part explained by the number of unaccompanied asylum-seeking youngsters which increased by 11 per cent to 5,070 over the last year, about 6 per cent of all children looked after in England.
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