Bring your suitcase, your bin liner, your dumpy bag. They’re handing out money faster than you can stuff it in a sack. All you need do is join the market in what may now be England’s most lucrative commodity. A commodity with arms and legs, hearts and brains, thoughts and feelings. Children.

Two years ago I stumbled into this issue after discovering that children in care who were being helped by a local charity I’m involved with were suddenly being whisked away, terminating the amazing progress they had been making, breaking their relationships, their sense of home, stability and security. When I began exploring why this was happening, I could scarcely believe what I was seeing: a highly lucrative trade in highly vulnerable young people. Children in “care” were being exchanged between private equity companies for £100,000 apiece. That figure is now wrong. Today they are worth far more.

A few days ago, the Financial Times published an investigation that I defy you to read with anything but open-mouthed horror. The average charge to the state by a private provider for a child in “care” is now £384,020 a year. That’s six times what Eton charges. Some providers now levy more than £1m per child per year, rising in a few cases for children with complex needs to more than £3m.

So everyone is cashing in. Alongside the big companies, which might invest in oil, gilts or crypto one day and children the next, the reporters found that “plumbers, hairdressers and Airbnb landlords with no experience in care” are opening “homes”. There might also be links to organised crime, as you can now make........

© The Guardian