The Rotherham child abuse scandal is not the first time the right-wing media has seized upon social work practice in order to chip away at the foundations of the welfare state.

Anti-racist practice clearly went wrong under poor management. But the wider picture is alarming. Of 50 child protection services inspected by Ofsted in 2012-13 because they had been previously identified as weak, more than one third were judged as still inadequate in terms of their overall effectiveness.

The origins of public provision for deprived children can be traced back to the Elizabethan Poor Law. There is now a real danger of a return to Poor Law conditions as austerity budgets slash away at the very foundations of the welfare state and privatisation is offered as the only solution.

The modern statutory framework was created following the recommendations of the Curtis Committee, set up 70 years ago in 1944 to inquire into the methods of providing for children deprived of a normal home life.

The committee criticised the way that central government responsibility for such children was diffused among several departments and found that standards of care were poor, even Dickensian.

The committee proposed a new and unified system with the aim of providing substitute care which would as far as possible offer loving family care to the children. It also emphasised the importance of training in child care.

In 1975 Parliament passed a Children Act which contained provisions relating to care proceedings, adoption, custodianship and the treatment of children in care.

The provisions of the Act were implemented in stages over the next 10 years. Various measures relating to children in care were consolidated into the Child Care Act 1980.

In 1984 the House of Commons social services committee produced a detailed report, Children in Care, which examined policy and practice in regard to children looked after by local authorities, voluntary organisations or bodies other than their families.

The report recommended that the DHSS establish a working party on child care law. This recommendation was accepted and the review which followed led via a white paper to the enactment of the Children Act 1989, which forms the basis of current childcare policy and practice.

The Children Act radically altered the legislative framework of services for children. The government’s intentions for the Act were set out in their first review of its operations, submitted to Parliament in 1992.

It said the Act was a charter for children. “Its overriding purpose is to promote and protect children’s welfare ... It seeks to strike a balance between the rights of children to express their views on decisions made about their lives, the rights of parents to exercise their responsibilities towards the child, and the duty of the state to intervene where the child’s welfare requires it.

“Central to the philosophy of the Act is the belief that children are best looked after within the family with both parents playing a full part and without resort to legal proceedings.”

The Act introduced a new responsibility for social services authorities to identify children in need, provide proactive support and, where possible, prevent them from having to be looked after away from home.

The assumption always was that the state and local authority welfare services would honour the promises of the 1945 Attlee government of cradle-to-the-grave care. Privateering was never part of the equation.

Running in parallel with these developments in legislation over the past decades has been a deepening sense of public concern prompted by evidence of widespread physical and sexual abuse in children’s homes.

Several major public inquiries have taken place. They include inquiries into abuse at the Kincora boys’ hostel in east Belfast (1989), the “pin down” regime in Staffordshire children’s homes (1991), Castle Hill School (1991), Ty Mawr former approved school in Gwent, Feltham Young Offenders’ Institution (1993) and Leicestershire children’s homes (1993).

A tribunal of inquiry and full-scale police investigation is currently examining allegations of abuse in children’s homes in North Wales. In addition there is the scandal of paedophile MPs and the Establishment cover-up at the heart of government.

The right-wing agenda coming out of these scandals is clear. Ofsted reports are seized upon to name and shame local government social care departments and add to the refrain that staff are feckless, overpaid and poorly managed.

The solution from the right-wing media is to allow private companies to bring market discipline and business ethics to families with multiple problems.

What is worrying is that there is now a momentum behind this policy aspiration, especially in the context of financial austerity and cuts to public services.

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 provision and leading to deprived areas becoming even more socially excluded.

Worse, there is some heavyweight intellectual support for opening up local government children’s social services to privateers, ironically coming from the London School of Economics, often cited as the place where modern social work was defined during the post-second world war political consensus.

The LSE’s social care guru Professor Julian Le Grand is pushing his plan to improve children’s social care by effectively privatising it and undermining the basic principles of the welfare state.

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.

Le Grand has been asked by the government to beef-up his earlier recommendations and is expected to report soon. The next government will likely take up this pernicious policy so be prepared for more attacks on children’s social care.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported in 2011 that one in seven board members of the first wave of clinical commissioning groups had a link to a private healthcare company. More than 60 per cent of those with private links were associated with Assura Medical (now VirginCare).

The Health and Social Care Act 2013 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 sub-standard and badly resourced services where staff morale is plunging.

The TTIP deal between Europe and the US will open up health and social care to rapacious vulture capitalists where profit rules and children don’t matter.

Both TTIP and the 2013 Health and Social Care Act are the latest examples of neoliberal economics dictating the shape and quality of welfare provision. They must be resisted.

Steven Walker is the author of Safeguarding Children and Young People, Russell House Publishing.