THE recent decision by the new Tory government to cut funding to the College of Social Work and end its existence is part and parcel of the attack on the welfare state. The mainstream media portrayed the decision as a rational step to end an organisation that had failed to recruit enough members. But in reality the Tories want to continue their ideological attack on welfare by undermining professionals working in social services who support vulnerable citizens.

When the college was set up in 2010, after the controversy sparked by the death of 17-month-old Peter Connelly, the outgoing Labour government said social work needed an authoritative voice. “Like the royal colleges in the health sector, the College of Social Work will help give the profession the standing it deserves and the status it needs to influence national policy-making and public debate. To this end, ministers have already expressed their support for the idea of the college becoming a royal college in due course.”

The college has been unique among bodies set up to represent professionals in that it sought to involve service users and carers in every part of the college’s governance, board membership and membership education and training. It is this commitment to representing ordinary people that rankled with Tory ministers.

Social workers represent the front line of the welfare state with the values of humanity, compassion and defending those people marginalised, discriminated against and neglected by society. Bureaucrats in the Department of Health were always uncomfortable with social workers who were perceived as awkward characters championing minority groups and advocating better care and more resources for their clients.

The government intention as with other sectors of the economy is to privatise social work. It recently handed a highly lucrative contract to a private company to deliver the new accreditation and assessment scheme for the advanced child and family practitioner award. KPMG and Morning Lane Associates will handle this work together with a revision of the professional capabilities framework which will shape future social work learning and practice. This is a crucial development and will see a shift in emphasis in social work training away from the core principles of anti-discriminatory practice and service user involvement towards a more individualistic and blaming culture.

So the government is already preparing the ground for the consequences of reducing the welfare state by forcing social workers to work in oppressive and unhelpful ways with people struggling to cope. The Tory plans also include splitting social work training between children’s services and adult services, which many social workers regard as folly because it compartmentalises problems rather than seeing them as complex and interlinked. New training programmes will see a further split between elite professionals with postgraduate level awards and others who will invariably be paid less.

A recent shocking report provided some insight into the likely consequences. The privatisation of young offenders institutions in Britain has led to an increase in incidents involving riots, self-harm and suicide. Most inmates come from deprived and disadvantaged backgrounds.

It is another example of where a former public service has been contracted out to big companies such as G4S and Serco, earning millions of pounds in profits while leading to a poorer service and more problems. The number of young people who have committed suicide in young offenders institutions over the past 10 years averages three per year. Last year, there were more than 3,000 incidents of violence in youth custody establishments and another 1,500 instances of self-harm — far more than before privatisation.

In 2013 Unicef ranked Britain 16th out of 29 developed countries for the welfare of children, up from 20th in 2007.

However the report warned that spending cuts to youth and children’s services could lead to a reversal of the gains in the last years of the Labour government. Britain has the second-worst mortality rate for children in western Europe and the highest levels of mental illness in under-25s. Poor children are twice as likely to die as the more affluent.

Mental ill-health among children and adolescents is also in crisis, with budget cuts damaging service provision and increasing waiting times for treatment, resulting in only a fraction of the need being met.

Suicide levels among Britain’s 15 to 25-year-olds have started to rise in line with cuts to public services. In May 2014, a report declared that the number of teenagers who have self-harmed has tripled in the last decade in England. The Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children (HBSC) report revealed that 20 per cent of the 15-year-olds questioned had hurt themselves in the previous year.

Privatising children’s care will herald a return to the Poor Law, with state institutions and practices overwhelmed by the most intractable, complex and labour-intensive work, leaving quick-fix, easy-to-solve problems to profiteers. The long-term consequences for social policy will be disastrous, cheating a generation of children of good-quality state care and leading to deprived areas becoming even more socially excluded.

Councils in Doncaster, Richmond and Kingston are experimenting with creating private companies to run social care, while Staffordshire and Bristol have allowed groups of social workers to set themselves up as independent practices separate from local authority control.

The Health and Social Care Act 2012 provides for the most lucrative parts of health and social care provision to be privatised — all part of establishing a two-tier welfare system where the rich pay for high-quality services while the poor are left with substandard and badly resourced services where staff morale is plunging.

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) deal between Europe and the US will further open up health and social care to rapacious vulture capitalists where profit rules and children don’t matter.

• Steven Walker is a Unicef children’s champion.