When the government set up its academy programme, nine years ago, people asked: why do you have to take control of these schools out of the hands of parents, teachers and the local community, and deliver them, bound hand and foot, into the hands of sponsors? Why do sponsors – mostly private companies and religions – have to have absolute and iron control, with an in-built majority on the governing board?

And the answer came back from ministers: because sponsors are putting in the money. Academies unlocked private sector funding. If say, Peter Vardy in the north east, or Robert Edmiston in the Midlands were to loosen their bulging wallets, they would expect something in return. That something, in the case of Vardy and Edmiston, was the chance to instil in their academies the ferocious evangelical Christianity which these two gentlemen espouse.

Of course the money was a tiny proportion of the capital cost, general tens of millions, and sponsors made no contribution at all to the running costs. For a one-off payment of £2 million they controlled their schools in perpetuity. But then, £2m wasn't to be sniffed at. £2m is £2m.

Except that it isn't. Even back in 2000, sponsors wanted the control without the entrance fee. Quite soon, ministers started talking about sponsors providing "up to £2m." And then, ever so quietly, five dreaded words were added: "...in cash or in kind." Gifts of the products a company makes, valued generously, could go towards the £2m. So could the services of an elderly executive, too senior to fire and too tired to be much use, to sit on committees, his time notionally charged out at a generous hourly rate. Even then, few of the sponsors ever produced the full £2m, either in cash or in kind.

I predicted what would happen two years ago in my book The Great City Academy Fraud (Continuum, 2007.) Eventually, when ministers hoped everyone had forgotten the original justification for academies, an education secretary would do what Ed Balls has just done, and remove the financial requirement entirely. The shallow pretence that academies could unlock private sector money would be abandoned, and we would find out what academies were really for; which was, quite simply, a means of privatising schools.

Academies are really about New Labour's conviction that there is nothing we can do for ourselves that private companies, religions and charities cannot do better for us. Ministers believe that schools are better off controlled by the United Learning Trust (ULT), the biggest academy sponsor, than if they were controlled by those who use them and those who live near to them.

ULT is a subsidiary of the United Church Schools Trust, which also runs a string of fee-charging schools. It is a Church of England organisation which controls its schools tightly from the centre, so that its heads do not even have authority to speak to the press without authorisation from head office, and has been condemned for low pay by the Head of Education at the trade union Unison, Christina McAnea. "Some ULT academies are losing staff at a similar rate to the hotel and catering industry" she said 11 months ago. "Paying one of the lowest minimum rates in the public sector must be contributing to this." There is an obvious solution. Give the people's schools back to the people.