Private Equity's Grip on UK Public Services: A Growing Concern

Children’s homes and care placements are not ordinary commodities. Yet Britain has allowed some of its most sensitive public services to become assets in private equity portfolios: bought, loaded with debt, restructured and sold, while the state continues to fund the contracts and vulnerable people carry the risk when things go wrong.

Private equity’s role in public services is not notional. The year after Compass Community was sold by its owner, Graphite Capital, to another private equity group, Cap10, the poor state of some of its children’s homes was made plain by Ofsted reports. Inspectors who visited two homes in England – which had previously been rated good and outstanding – found “high levels of distress” and staff as well as children feeling unsafe. Cap10 denies that standards fell following the change of ownership.

A disability equipment supplier’s collapse in 2025 left people without wheelchairs and hoists essential for daily living. Four Seasons, once one of Britain’s biggest care home providers, failed under £1.5bn of debt. The pattern is clear: financial engineering creates risks that vulnerable people are left to bear.

Such collapses offer dramatic proof of what can go wrong under private equity owners, who typically buy businesses and resell them a few years later, extracting as much capital as possible. But the wider, less visible effects of private equity’s role in public services also require scrutiny. New research by the Guardian has revealed the disturbing extent of this. About £24.4bn of public money went to companies controlled by private equity firms in the year to April 2025 – or £1 in every £11 of public spending on contractors.

More than a third came from council spending in specialist areas such as social care and special education, as well as essential services including cleaning and waste. Research on nurseries has found that private owners typically offer lower pay and fewer opportunities for parental involvement than public or non-profit ones. The risks are visible beyond public services. The competition authorities found veterinary consolidation left pet owners overpaying by £1bn. But when the same ownership model enters disability support or social care, the stakes are higher: people cannot simply walk away.

Private equity is built around leverage, rapid restructuring and exit. That makes it especially unsuitable for services involving councils’ statutory duties and human need. When a care provider fails, the damage cannot be contained by market choice. It falls on families, workers and the state.

Transparency rules should be tightened. The interests of workers and taxpayers should be considered along with shareholders, when the markets being regulated are not for consumer goods, such as shoes, but for healthcare and even childhood homes. Sale-and-leaseback arrangements, under which businesses lose ownership of their assets, should be eliminated from public services. So should the practice of transferring the loans used to buy a business to the balance-sheet of the business itself.