This book is intended as a contribution to the debate that needs to be further promoted about the government’s policies for children’s services and social care in England. This is a debate which has urgency, as the government has been moving at pace to pursue its intentions of rapidly increasing the privatisation of social work and developing an even greater marketplace in children’s social services and child protection.

It is a book which focuses on England, as what is happening in England is quite different from the other administrations within the United Kingdom. Indeed, the privatisation policies being promoted in England go beyond what is happening anywhere else in the world. They now allow the assessment of children and families, the drafting of children in need and child protection plans, the initiation of court proceedings to remove children from families, and the subsequent decisions as to where children should live and with whom – all integral and crucial activities and responsibilities within statutory children’s social work and local authority children’s social services – to be contracted out to other organisations including commercial companies, and the big outsourcing companies have already been exploring the opportunities in the marketplace which is being created.

Although the focus of the book is social work, children’s social services and child protection in England, it provides an alarm call to other countries and administrations where neoliberal ideology has since the 1980s become ingrained and where competitive marketisation and privatisation is now embedded, distorting the role and remit of what were public services.

In a series of moves fuelled by political ideology and dogma, although now more quietly expressed than previously, social work and social care in England, for children and for adults, are being taken beyond the boundaries of what had previously been seen as sensible and acceptable. Recent Prime Ministers such as Tony Blair, and then David Cameron, and ministers such as Michael Gove and Andrew Lansley, have pushed ahead with the privatisation of public welfare services. When Mr Cameron led the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government, his enthusiasm for the market and private sector and his rhetoric outstripped the aspirations and actions of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. Mrs May, his successor as Prime Minister, has shown no sign of changing script or course.