Speaking on Sky News, Reform’s Richard Tice let slip that capitalists are milking child social care for profit:

Private equity owned independent schools are making off like bandits while outcomes for the most needy children are not improving. So those are the sorts of things that we need to look at to get better outcomes for children, while reducing costs.

Then, presenter Trevor Phillips asked:

Hang on, Reform is going to nationalise social care?

Tice swiftly backtracked:

I didn’t say that, I just said there are things you can do better

Richard Tice accidentally lets slip that the privatisation of SEND services means private equity groups are “making off like bandits” i.e. robbing the taxpayer

Then swiftly backtracks when he realises he just criticised the privatisation of public services pic.twitter.com/A9nLqePb1x

— Farrukh (@implausibleblog) January 4, 2026

Richard Tice was inadvertently right

Of course, Richard Tice was right (even though he didn’t mean to be).

Private schools are consistently charging the public purse (through local councils) £250,000 per year, per child to educate children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). One private school that Abu Dhabi wealth fund Mubadala owns has local councils as its key client. It’s making £44.6m per year in profit. That’s after a 494% increase in revenues from 2014-2024.

The thing with private education in general is that it takes resources and expertise away from public education. And of course, with SEND, it’s vulnerable children that capitalists are profiteering from.

The extraction of resources (through profit) is true of the UK’s care system as a whole.

A collaboration between the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES), the Centre for Thriving Places (CTP), Co-operatives UK and the New Economics Foundation notes that:

Over the past few decades, care has been turned into something to profit from rather than a public good. Private equity firms, hedge funds and offshore billionaire owners now dominate the sector, using debt, rent, and complex ownership structures to pull money out — not just from the care system, but from our local economies too. While the services themselves struggle to stay afloat, these owners can pay directors huge salaries and hand out big dividends, while frontline staff work long hours for low pay and little security.

SEND pupil funding

In December, Labour announced £3bn in funding for SEND pupils. But it’s unclear how much of that will be eaten up via local councils paying private schools or through the government subsidising private schools themselves.

What is clear is that Richard Tice was accidentally spot on with his assessment of the privatisation of public services. It enables capitalists to ‘make off like bandits’ with guaranteed profit from basic essentials.

Featured image via the Canary

By James Wright

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