'Children in care shouldn't be a route to profit': Baroness Lola Young on privatisation of children's homes

More than 100,000 children in the UK are in care. That’s the population of a town like Maidstone or Wigan. Most are looked after by foster placements, but 19% in England are housed in residential accommodation (the picture varies across the nations, with the figure being 11% in Scotland and 10% in Wales).

In England, more than 80% of these children’s homes are privately run. Behind many are private equity firms – some offshore – earning millions in profits from the care of vulnerable children. With council budgets stretched and demand rising, the residential care sector has rapidly become a lucrative investment opportunity.

For Baroness Lola Young, this is more than a policy failure – it’s a moral one.

“It drives me nuts that children’s homes are privatised,” she says. “I cannot, in any world, think of how you would have a system whereby distressed children and young people become a means of making a profit. Financial profit. How does that even come about?”

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Young, who has been a member of the House of Lords since 2004, speaks from personal experience. From the age of eight weeks to 18 years, Baroness Young was moved between foster care placements and children’s homes in North London. Now 74, she brings a rare combination of political power and lived experience to a conversation often dominated by policy experts and well-resourced operators.

As of 31 March 2024, private companies ran 83% of children’s homes (2,824). Overall, there are 14,486 places for children in residential care homes in England, private companies providing 77% of them (9,917). 

A 2024 Children and Young People and Families Policy and Performance Board report identified three cases of homes charging in excess of £15,000 per week per child. In 2022–23 alone, councils in England spent £2.4 billion on residential care placements, compared with £2.2 billion on all early intervention services that support families and help prevent children entering care. Some of the largest providers are owned by offshore private equity firms, with reported profit margins of more than 20%.

And it’s a growing ‘industry’. Since 2014, the number of children’s homes of all types – private and operated by local authorities – has increased by 70%, from 2,057 to 3,491. The increase continues the commodification of vulnerable children.

Young people are often placed in homes hundreds of miles away, not because it’s in their best interest, but because it’s where a vacancy exists. This transactional logic is the opposite of what vulnerable children need.

The government has promised to cap “unwarranted” profits in the sector. But for Young, the premise itself is flawed. She says: “To me, all profit-making is unwarranted in that sector. How can distressed children and young people be a route to financial return?”

Read more:

• How privatisation of foster care is turning vulnerable children into money-making commodities
• How Beyond Paradise places foster care at the heart of primetime detective drama
• Should care experience be a protected characteristic? Care leavers speak out on status debate

Young recently raised these concerns during the second reading of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill in the House of Lords. While the bill includes significant proposals for the care system, she’s worried that care too often takes a backseat in national conversations: “I wouldn’t go as far as to say that it feels like an afterthought, but I wouldn’t say that it’s at the forefront.”

Early years provide the fundamental foundations that the rest of our lives are built on. It took decades – when she was in her 50s – for Young to learn that care-experienced adults could request to see their own records.

“Don’t open them on the bus,” she advises, recalling the moment she finally received the documents. “Everything was soggy because it was pouring with rain. I was juggling all these sheets on my knee.”

The records were unusually complete: “How many people have evidence of when their teeth came through or when they started walking and talking?” Alongside clinical notes were letters from her foster mother, Daisy, whom she lived with until she was 14, and some pieces of teenage writing she’d long forgotten. “It was definitely worth the effort,” she says, though cautions others to tread carefully. “If you feel you can’t face it, don’t face it at that particular time. That’s absolutely OK.”

Despite having spent her early life in care, Young had no sense of a wider care community growing up. She knew no one else like her in public life. 

“Could I name a famous care-experienced person growing up? No,” she laughs. “That’s the very simple answer.”

It wasn’t until much later that she came across people like Bruce Oldfield, the fashion designer who grew up in a Barnardo’s home. 

“He’s probably a bit older than me, but he was the one,” she says. “Back in the day, you didn’t even talk about care experience.”

The word “Barnardo’s”, she notes, carried enormous stigma. “Anybody my age would know it was a home for kids who ‘weren’t wanted’. That was basically the label we had – to be brutal.” There was no softened language, no talk of “looked-after children” or “care leavers”. “None of this language existed,” Young says. “It was just: abandoned kids.”

Now there is a strong and supportive community for people in care and those with care experience. Earlier this year, Young served as a judge for the Coram Voices writing competition, an annual showcase for care-experienced children and young people.

One entry in particular, she recalls, brought her to tears. “It was someone dealing with a predicament that would affect anyone, anywhere – but also being in care on top of that. Having the mental space and capacity to make it into something creative is such an achievement. I know that can sound a bit patronising, but it’s not. To me, it’s extraordinary.”

Had the Coram competition existed when Young was young, she wouldn’t have written something personal. “I would have written fiction, like a detective adventure or sci-fi, one of the genres I was so enamoured with as a kid. It might have ended up being a metaphor for something, but I wouldn’t have written about myself.”

That desire to fictionalise – to escape the self – is something that many care-experienced people will recognise. 

“As a child, I was so wanting to be outside of myself,” she says. Now, her work is about helping others feel more firmly inside their own lives, which is what drives her advocacy.

The ongoing debate about making ‘care experience’ a protected characteristic is an idea that’s gaining traction – and one Young supports in principle. “Three weeks in care is different from 17 years in care. A stable foster home is different to being moved hundreds of miles in the middle of the night. It’s not one experience, so it will be hard to define.

“It’s a hook, a way to ask bigger questions. What does support look like? What would it mean to help someone move beyond survival into a good life?”

She reels off examples: free travel, guaranteed job interviews, targeted education funding. It could also help prevent the community being taken advantage of by those seeking to make a profit by giving their voice a platform.

“Ask what’s working. Ask what’s not. Ask the young people themselves. And then actually listen.”

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