The British Government seems to be very fond of the idea of
outsourcing child protection - and other children’s services that are currently
provided by local authorities in England - to ‘trusts’ involving charities. The
mantra that is often recited is that such bodies will be better innovators and
will be more likely to deliver higher quality services than traditional
bureaucracies. The sad tale of Kids Company goes a long way to contradicting
that roseate vision.
The House of Commons Public Administration and
Constitutional Affairs Committee has just produced its fourth report of session
2015–16 entitled “The collapse of Kids Company: lessons for charity trustees,professional firms, the Charity Commission, and Whitehall”.
On page 4 of the report it is concluded that government’s reviews
and assessments of Kids Company over many years were “disjointed and limited’,
often being carried out or commissioned by the charity itself. These were “… read
selectively by successive Governments to confirm a pre-existing and positive
impression of the charity and justify future funding”. The report also found “a
lack of sufficient evidence” of the effectiveness of the charity, “clear signs
of financial mismanagement”, which were ignored, and a failure to carry out
adequate due diligence.
The truth is that complex services are notoriously difficult
to outsource. It’s not just that the contracts need to be of labyrinthine
complexity but, perhaps more importantly, monitoring and enforcing compliance
is treacherous. If a local authority outsourced most of its key children’s
services, it would need a small army of lawyers to draft and interpret the
contracts and a small army of inspectors to ensure that the contractor was
fulfilling its obligations. That’s lots of resources going into administrative
overhead and so taking resources away from front line services.
I don’t find it surprising that the government failed to
monitor the Kids Company contract properly. I would not be surprised to learn
at some future point that local authorities are not monitoring outsourced
services properly. It is in the nature of the beast. It’s very hard to do. In
fact it’s a lot harder than doing the job properly yourself in the first place!
