Common Weal are the only group telling the Government to keep “The Promise” in full

How much should private companies be allowed to profit from providing care for vulnerable children?

If you asked the Scottish Government when they made “The Promise”, the answer would be zero. To quote them at the time “Scotland must make sure that its most vulnerable children are not profited from”.

Although we don’t appear to have any public polling on the matter in Scotland, a poll of social workers in Wales found that 85% of them back the banning of profit in children’s care at least in principle. Wales is pushing forward with their plan to eliminate all profit from such care.

Many will likely back this principle. Organisations must cover their costs when delivering services and workers deserve fair pay, but the idea that companies and their shareholders extract profits (often paid for out of public money) from caring for children sticks particularly roughly in the craw.

And yet, when a public consultation on the banning of profit in children’s care in Scotland is held there were just 31 responses of which only one – Common Weal – called for the Scottish Government to fulfil its Promise in full and to eliminate all profit from children’s care.

Common Weal was also the only organisation to point out the major flaws in defining “profit” in care, showing that organisations can easily pad out their expenditure with high Director salaries (though simultaneously, these companies often underpay their front-line carers compared to public sector counterparts) or can transfer money between their not-for-profit care delivery company and the for-profit company that owns them.

We expanded on our consultation response in a policy paper that you can read here as well as a summary of the methods of profit extraction here.

What’s particularly key to the analysis of this consultation though is that results like these are of prime importance to the Government when it comes to making their own policies. Those policies must be evidenced and public consultation is a vital part of both that evidence and the transparency of policy-making.

But when a consultation receives limited responses and when those responses are 97% against the principle laid down by The Promise (by which we include also the responses in favour of merely “limiting” profit extraction from children’s care) then it becomes easy for the Government to justify their own slide away from their stated principle.

This perhaps explains why the Government admitted being “shocked” by our findings when they were presented with them but immediately reiterated that they weren’t going to change their policy of merely “limiting” profit in children’s care.

It also highlights the importance of organisations like Common Weal and our ability to respond to what can be highly technical and sector-specific consultations. Without our dissenting voice, the Government would have seen unanimous support for the continuation of profit in children’s care. We’ve seen this before where we have been almost the sole voice in public consultations pushing back against business interests such as the one that saw the Scottish Government grant substantial devolved tax breaks to Freeports despite not doing any economic modelling of the impact of those cuts or the “evidence” presented by them in favour of cutting airline taxes which turned out to be written up for them by Edinburgh Airport – the primary beneficiary of the cuts.

But as vital as public consultations are for our democracy, there are just far too many to keep up with. Even if Common Weal dropped all of our work and focused entirely on responding to consultations, we’d never be able to reach them all. But we do as many as we can and we’re always extremely grateful for your support to enable us to do so.

This goes too for our Daily Briefings. Many more news stories happen each day than we can possibly comment on (this briefing today could have also been about our views on teacher numbers, Australia's social media ban for under-16s, or the rising use of AI by children dealing with mental health issues to name just three other stories just affecting kids). As we get towards the end of this year, we’d like to hear from you about our Daily Briefings, our weekly magazine, (both of which you can subscribe to here) our In Common column in The National (which you can subscribe to here) and our other means of reaching out to you. Are you finding them useful and interesting? Are we covering the right stories or are we missing ones that you’d like us to cover? Is there anything else we can do to get information to you and to help you to spread it to others? Please click the contact button below and let us know.