Westminster was in a febrile mood last week after a frustrated man who failed to win his party leadership contest switched sides following the discovery of his treachery. “It’s the right thing for the country,” said Robert Jenrick pompously after being ejected by the Tories. Never mind that he is a repulsive character whose soul seems corroded by ambition, let alone that his justification for defection drips with hypocrisy, given his own dismal ministerial record. Nor indeed that he and his new boss were scathing about each other’s abilities in the past. All just banter, they said with smirks, typical rough and tumble of politics that should not be taken too seriously.
It was hard not to feel sick listening to these self-serving people so casually dismiss what they told the public, then watching other politicians and pundits pontificate with frothy excitement about the manoeuvrings. They shifted seamlessly to discussing the latest strife in Labour ranks. It was all about personalities and positioning, never policy. So the post-war world order gets ripped apart by a power-crazed egomaniac in the White House, our economy is still stagnant and many public services are in pitiful shape. But in Westminster, they were playing their tribal games, jostling for jobs – and then telling the electorate not to take their jousting at face value.
Out in the real world, an inquest was taking place into a terrible tragedy that serves as a damning indictment of our society. Martina Karos was a loving mother – but she took the life of her eight-year-old disabled daughter Eleni, then killed herself. She seemed to have had decent state support but struggled with mental health, feeling increasingly exhausted, isolated and lonely, like too many parents of children with profound disabilities. And in her desperation and deep sadness, she feared for Eleni’s future. “I didn’t want her to end up in the system or as an unwanted child, as that often happens with children like her,” read one note she left behind.
The Bolton coroner admitted this was far from a unique case. We know loneliness is rife in our atomised society. And research suggests more than four in ten parents of disabled or chronically ill children consider taking their own life due to the stress. As I know from my own family, it is a lonely struggle caring for a child with serious needs – and this can be made worse for parents by a nagging fear of what might happen if they can no longer care for their child due to death, infirmity or mental breakdown. One friend told the inquest about Martina’s concerns if she was not around to care for her daughter: “She didn’t feel secure Eleni would be well cared for.”
The inquest concluded on the same day that Jenrick, who served as a health and social care minister in Liz Truss’s toxic government, joined Reform UK, a party that he previously told voters could not be trusted to run public services. Then the next day, a parliamentary committee released a report that exposed the putrid state of a most pivotal part of the public sector. It showed why loving parents live in terror of the state taking charge of their children – and why many voters feel so betrayed by Westminster failings as they watch puffed-up politicians play their sordid games.
The Public Accounts Committee found that nearly 800 children, about one in ten of those in residential care, were put in illegal homes last year, for an average of six months at a time. Bear in mind that taking a child from its family is among the most drastic interventions ever made by the state. Yet these children – traumatised and frequently victims of abuse – are getting dumped in places run mostly by private operators without any checks into the quality of care or suitability of those in charge. As the MPs said, this is “unacceptable” and shows “the children’s residential care system in England is not working with too many children being put at risk”. And the annual costs can be extortionate: averaging £318,400 and more than £1m in some cases.
This is not a new issue, however, since this is merely the latest in a string of such reports. They expose how children, taken into care because their parents get deemed unfit to raise them, can get dumped in caravans and rented holiday flats. Some are teenagers, others so young they have not yet started school. Almost two-thirds have complex needs or disabilities. The alarm was raised six years ago by the Children’s Commissioner, who feared “profit-making” was being prioritised over the wellbeing of our most vulnerable children. Two years later, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), calling for an end to the use of illegal homes by next year, said the biggest providers had profit margins of 22.6 per cent. But the scandal still drags on.
As so often with the state, this is a short-term solution – to shortages of residential homes – that became stuck due to political inertia, despite soaring cost to taxpayers and frightening inadequacy of provision. This left voracious private operators to feast on Westminster’s failure, as elsewhere in the social care and mental health sectors. The impact is profound on children who crave love and normality. And the issue plagues wider society since they are far more likely to end up as adults with mental health problems or in prison; people behind bars are twelve times more likely to have spent time in care during childhood compared with other Britons.
Routine use of illegal homes for children being taken into care should be shocking, sparking an immediate outcry and political action. This serves as the starkest possible symbol of grotesque state failure. Yet such crucial issues for the well-being of both citizens and the nation get swept aside amid the frenzied focus on personalities tussling for power. Keir and Kemi, Nigel and Rob? They are all standard bearers for a political system that is collectively failing too many people with terrible consequences.
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