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Twenty-odd years ago - before the child abuse issue erupted in north Wales and threw into stark relief the problems of accountability in local authorities - I wrote a dissertation on the drawbacks and dangers of privatising social work because, even then, services were beset by stealth cuts which could have only one outcome.

Government is now shamelessly dismantling the public service infrastructure, drawing the private sector into transport, utilities, health, education, social services and even policing - all of which should remain the state's business - and introducing market forces and the profit motive where neither has a place. As Richard Morrison commented in The Times (13 June) on the subject of preventable urban decay, "brutal financial arguments prevailed over broader social, environmental and aesthetic considerations".


Too often the arguments themselves are flawed. Far from saving money, engaging the private sector involves spending vast amounts of public funds upfront on incentives and investment; more goes on underwriting returns far into the future.

The true financial burden is never-ending, from mothballing existing fixed resources to make way for the new, down to redesigning logos and reprinting letterheads. Reorganisation always exacts a high price, and each time government tinkers with existing structures which, although far from perfect, work well enough (the poll tax was a prime example), billions are squandered.

Then, inevitably taxation rockets to refill the coffers while services degenerate exponentially. For example, take the recent case of road accident victim Rachel King, who was reported as needing a scan. NHS waiting time is 80 weeks but, by paying £983 to the hospital's self-pay unit, she may be seen by the same staff and use the same scanner - bought with public funds - in only two weeks. This illustrates the deeply inequitable and unacceptable outcome of so-called public-private alliances and exposes the way chunks are cut from limited public resources to guarantee the private operator's slice of cake.

When local authorities and the NHS had established workforces, year-on-year expenditure on staffing, their biggest outlay, was predictable. On the opposite side of the question, staff also knew where they stood. Today, with little or no job security for anyone and professional principles sacrificed to "efficiency", morale is at an all-time low and so chronic are staffing shortfalls that hospitals and social services cannot function without buying in agency personnel, at crippling cost.

According to Unison's latest research, 90 per cent of the public deeply opposes not-so-creeping privatisation and, while it may be overly cynical to suggest that government consciously engineered infrastructural collapse to justify divesting apparently intractable problems, "progress" seems as unstoppable as a runaway train. Social work garners little public sympathy and its total restructuring, driven in no small part by scandal, avoidable disaster and aversion to internal policing, will be the next to hurtle down the line.


Introducing mechanisms to license social workers was a genuine step in the right direction - except that the mechanisms are already in crisis. Too many fingers in the pie, too many bureaucratic procedures and too little expertise have left qualified workers unlicensed and technically unemployable. In my view, making social workers independent of primary employers and creating a body of self-employed professionals working to contract would be courting complete disaster. At present, employers are responsible for organisation, regulation, referral, resource allocation, cost management, monitoring, insurance - all crucial to a functioning service. Removing them, as the education experience showed, creates a vacuum, into which flood innumerable, overstaffed and under-experienced agencies with enormous overheads.

In risk-prone activities, such as policing, health and social work, lines of accountability must be crystal clear. Parcelling out or otherwise fragmenting accountability significantly increases risk, as the underlying structural incoherence which resulted in Victoria Climbie's murder so tragically proved. Her case management is dire proof that too many cooks poison the broth and, when death ensues, that no one will admit blame.

Private sector survival depends on making money; protecting assets is part of the process. Social work has no assets, just multiple liabilities in the shape of needy clients, and its privatisation would dangerously compromise their already fragile welfare. In addition, the more remote the managing agency, the easier it is to obfuscate, deny bad practice, endlessly pass the buck and close ranks.

In Victoria Climbie's case, every public service professional who failed her was identifiable, yet only her front-line social worker took the rap.

Alison Taylor is a novelist and senior child care worker