The Government has made changes to the Children and Social Work Bill in a bid to sooth fears that private organisations could profit from social services.
Campaigners, MPs and academics had raised concerns that a controversial clause in the Bill would give the secretary of state power to exempt local authorities from statutory responsibilities in order to ‘innovate’.
Yesterday, peers warned the clause could be interpreted in such a way that would allow companies that have been contracted to deliver child protection services to roll back on rules preventing them from making a profit.
The Department for Education’s parliamentary under-secretary, Lord Nash, said he understood how the clause could be ‘used to reopen’ the matter of profit-making from children’s services and tabled a government amendment that would ‘explicitly rule out’ using the clause for such purposes.
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