Four types of market failure in one broadcast: why youth care is not self-correcting
The Zembla documentary reveals all four classic characteristics of market failure in youth care. They reinforce each other because the information system that should make them visible does not exist.
Four types of market failure in one broadcast: why youth care is not self-correcting
31 March 2026 · House of Viridian · iRecord
The Zembla documentary Children Nobody Wants (26 March 2026) documents a youth care system that is failing at every level. The reflexive response is: more money, more places, more specialism. But the documentary reveals something more fundamental. What is happening to the 400+ young people in solo placements exhibits all four classic characteristics of market failure. And they reinforce each other, precisely because the information system that should make them visible does not exist.
Information asymmetry
This is the most immediate and the most destructive. No party in the chain has the full picture.
The guardianship institution of Lex calls 30 organisations looking for a placement. Each organisation assesses the request based on its own information, without knowing how many others have already said no, what has been tried before, and why it did not work. The municipality of Smallingerland pays €20,000 per week to a care provider, with no way to benchmark what other municipalities pay for comparable arrangements. The IGJ says explicitly that it did not know solo placements were occurring at this scale, because they are not registered. The alderman describes his municipality's position as that of a "funder on the sidelines" — obliged to pay what judges order and certified institutions determine, without any overview of the whole.
Zembla had to contact 342 municipalities and conduct months of research to obtain basic figures. Three quarters responded. Many municipalities were unable to supply the requested numbers. The fact that a television programme has to fill the information gap that supervisors, funders, and policymakers should themselves possess is already a diagnosis of the system.
Externalities
A care provider that refuses a complex child does not bear the cost of that decision. The costs fall on the municipality, on the next provider in the chain, on the young person who is moved on yet again, and on society when that young person ultimately ends up in a youth prison. The placement carousel documented in the broadcast is one unbroken chain of negative externalities that are internalised nowhere.
Peter Dijkhoorn puts it precisely in the documentary: each successive provider in the chain assesses the child afresh, establishes a new diagnosis, initiates a new treatment. When that fails, the child is passed on. What no one does is look back and examine what earlier providers should have done differently. The damage from each failed placement accumulates in the child, not in the institution that made the wrong assessment.
Public goods
Coordination information is a public good in the economic sense: non-rival and non-excludable. The fact that organisation A and organisation B are both involved with the same child is valuable to both, and use by one does not diminish its value to the other. But neither has an individual incentive to produce and share that information. So the shared overview exists nowhere.
The VIR was an attempt to publicly finance this public good. A flawed attempt: the system only registered a "match" when two professionals flagged the same young person, with no substantive information attached. But it was at least something. It is being abolished. VWS has confirmed that no replacement system is coming.
Market power
Once specialised providers become scarce, they dictate the price. The Zembla documentary shows how this mechanism works: Rosales Zorg housed 90 children in holiday cottages last year, twice as many as the year before. Municipalities say in the broadcast that they frequently have no choice but to engage with providers of this kind. A day rate of €2,200 is not the outcome of a functioning market. It is the outcome of a demand side that has no alternative and a supply side that knows it.
The alderman of Smallingerland puts his finger on the paradox: "He who pays calls the tune — but that doesn't apply here." The municipality pays, but determines nothing. It executes what judges order and certified institutions plan, without instruments to assess the price, quality, or efficiency of the care delivered.
The common denominator
The four forms of market failure do not operate independently of one another. Externalities go uncorrected because they are invisible, for lack of information. The public good is not produced because no one is institutionally responsible for it. Market power goes unchecked because municipalities cannot compare. Information asymmetry is the structural condition under which the other three can operate unimpeded.
That does not make the information problem the sole cause of what Zembla documents. The political decision to wind down closed youth care without financing alternatives is a policy choice, not an information gap. The shortage of specialist placements is a capacity problem. But those choices could be made without political consequences, and they can persist without correction, precisely because the full picture is invisible. Had the minister, the IGJ, and parliament been able to see in real time what was happening to 400+ children, "we'll leave it to the market" would not have been politically tenable.
The correction that does not come
The standard response to market failure is regulation. WAMS is exactly that: legislation intended to enable the government to close the information vacuum and legitimise cross-domain data sharing. The bill has stalled politically after two cabinet crises. Meanwhile, professionals do not dare to share information for fear of privacy violations, while placing children in situations that the courts find contrary to the law and to international treaties. In an earlier analysis we described why waiting for WAMS is not an option, and what legal space the existing framework already provides.
What this requires
A functioning information system does not solve every problem the documentary exposes. It does not solve the capacity shortage, the political debate about closed youth care, or the underfunding. But it makes each of those problems visible, verifiable, and thereby politically addressable. And it gives professionals the tools to act in emergency situations on the basis of a documented balancing of interests, rather than withholding information out of fear of the consequences.
The 42 youth care regions that are legally required to collaborate regionally from 2027 face exactly this challenge. Regional collaboration without a regional information system is a contradiction in terms. The question is not whether such a system needs to exist, but who builds it, who manages it, and whether it is capable not only of registering when professionals follow the rules, but also when they deviate from those rules responsibly.
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