By The Women’s Railroad
16th July 2026
Imagine opening an act of Parliament and finding a supermarket named inside it. Not “a company authorised by the Secretary of State.” Not “an approved retailer.” Tesco plc, by name, sitting inside a definition section, holding a power ordinarily reserved for the state.
You would assume it was a mistake, or satire, or something from a different, stranger country.
It isn’t hypothetical. It’s already happened. Just not with Tesco.
The actual legislation
Section 31(9) of the Children Act 1989 defines who is allowed to apply to a court for a care order, a supervision order, or an emergency protection order, powers that let a private entity ask the state to remove a child from their family. The definition reads:
“authorised person” means (a) the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and any of its officers; and (b) any person authorised by order of the Secretary of State to bring proceedings under this section and any officer of a body which is so authorised.
Read that again. Paragraph (a) does not say “a charity authorised by the Secretary of State.” It names one specific organisation directly, by its full legal title, ahead of and separate from the general route in paragraph (b) that every other organisation in the country would have to go through. The NSPCC does not need ministerial authorisation. It is written into the statute itself. It has held this status for over a century, and section 44(1)(c) extends the same principle to emergency protection orders, allowing the NSPCC to apply for a child’s immediate removal from their home on the same legal footing as a local authority.
No other charity holds this. No business holds this. In the entire law of England and Wales, one named organisation sits inside primary legislation with a state power written specifically into its name.
Why this should unsettle you, regardless of how you feel about the NSPCC
This is not an argument about whether the NSPCC does good work. It is a structural argument, and the two things are entirely separate.
Handing a single private institution a permanent, built in role in the machinery of the state is a genuinely unusual thing to do, precisely because it removes that institution from the ordinary checks everyone else is subject to. It is not about whether that institution can be trusted today. It is about what happens when one organisation’s judgement becomes structurally fused with state power, with no mechanism to revisit that fusion if things ever changed.
That question has never really been asked here. Why is there no separation between commerce and law? Why can a private, unelected organisation be permanently written into an Act of Parliament, when a supermarket, a bank, or a tech company holding the same status would strike everyone as absurd on sight?
This is not an argument against child protection
None of this is a case against the NSPCC’s work, or against child protection itself. The NSPCC has, for well over a century, intervened to protect children who were being abused and at genuine risk of harm, and that work has mattered. This is not in dispute, and it should not need repeating in every paragraph to be taken seriously.
But good work does not require a permanent, named legal status to continue. A court still has to approve any care order, supervision order, or emergency protection order, whoever applies for it. If the NSPCC’s evidence and judgement are as strong as its record suggests, it does not need to be named directly in statute to bring that evidence before a judge, it could apply for exactly the same court approval any other properly authorised body can seek, on the same footing as a local authority, tested and granted case by case rather than assumed by name. The objection here is not that the NSPCC intervenes to protect children. It is that one named organisation was given a permanent, statutory shortcut to do so that no other equally capable body, however good its work, has ever been offered.
The NSPCC’s arrangement is a one off. The habit behind it is not.
Once you start looking, the NSPCC turns out to be one of the more restrained examples of a much wider pattern: Parliament quietly delegating core state functions to private and commercial bodies through narrow statutory carve outs, often with far less oversight attached than most people would assume.
Private prisons
Section 84 of the Criminal Justice Act 1991 allows the Secretary of State to contract out the running of an entire prison to a private company. Under sections 85 and 86, that company’s own staff, called “prisoner custody officers,” hold statutory powers to search prisoners and visitors, use reasonable force, and maintain custody and discipline, the same functions ordinarily carried out by state prison officers. Section 86A goes further still, giving these employees of a for profit company the power to physically detain a member of the public for up to two hours pending police arrival, if they suspect an offence has been committed. This is a commercial company holding one of the state’s most fundamental powers, the deprivation of a person’s liberty, written directly into statute. It is, if anything, a starker example than the NSPCC, because the NSPCC’s power is protective and still requires a court’s separate approval before anything happens. A private prison officer’s power to physically restrain someone requires no such step in the moment it is used.
Certificated enforcement agents
Private bailiff firms are authorised under the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act 2007 to enter people’s homes and seize goods to enforce debts, a genuinely coercive power exercised inside someone’s front door. What should stop you is this: there is currently no statutory regulator for this industry at all. Oversight runs through a voluntary accreditation scheme, the Enforcement Conduct Board, which the vast majority of firms have joined by choice, not because the law compels them to. An entire commercial sector holds the power to enter your home, and polices itself largely because it has agreed to.
Private prosecution, and the Post Office
Section 6(1) of the Prosecution of Offences Act 1985 preserves the right of any person or organisation, including a private company, to bring a criminal prosecution. This is the exact legal mechanism that allowed the Post Office to privately prosecute hundreds of sub postmasters in the Horizon scandal, one of the most damaging miscarriages of justice in recent British history, built entirely on a private, commercial entity holding prosecutorial power with essentially no independent scrutiny until the Director of Public Prosecutions eventually chose to intervene. This is not a hypothetical warning. It is the clearest possible demonstration of what happens when this kind of power sits with a company rather than the state, and it happened within living memory.
The RSPCA
Not formally an “authorised person” in the way the NSPCC is, the RSPCA relies on the same general private prosecution right available to anyone. But in practice, it functions as a de facto enforcement body for animal welfare law, prosecuting cases at scale, in a way that quietly blurs the same line.
What happens if this changes?
Here is the question none of this arrangement has ever had to answer. Local authorities are democratically accountable. Their conduct can be scrutinised, challenged, and reformed through ordinary political processes, elections, public inquiries, and ministerial oversight. A charity named directly into statute has no equivalent mechanism if its judgement, leadership, or culture changes over time.
This is not an abstract risk. Britain has already lived through what happens when a well-intentioned child protection body gets it badly wrong at scale. In the Cleveland child abuse scandal of the 1980s, more than 100 children were removed from their families based on methods that were later discredited. The organisations involved believed, sincerely, that they were protecting children. Good intentions did not prevent the harm.
The NSPCC may never make that kind of error. But the statute does not depend on that. Section 31(9) does not say ‘the NSPCC, for as long as it remains trustworthy.’ It is a permanent grant, fixed in 1989, with no built-in review, no expiry, and no mechanism to reconsider it, regardless of what the organisation looks like in fifty years’ time.
If the idea of Tesco holding that same status strikes you as absurd, the discomfort is doing exactly what it should. The only difference between the two is which name Parliament happened to write down.
References
- Children Act 1989, section 31(9) and section 44(1)(c), legislation.gov.uk
- Criminal Justice Act 1991, sections 84, 85, 86 and 86A, legislation.gov.uk
- Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act 2007, legislation.gov.uk
- Prosecution of Offences Act 1985, section 6(1), legislation.gov.uk
