Tories back Every Child Matters as cuts loom

Thursday, 18 June 2009

The Conservative Party has insisted it is committed to the Every Child Matters (ECM) agenda, as National Children's Bureau chief executive Paul Ennals this week warned that political uncertainty is prompting preventative services to be discarded.

Tim Loughton and children

As the row over spending cuts intensified between the two main political parties, shadow children's minister Tim Loughton told CYP Now: "We are signed up to the Every Child Matters agenda, so there will not be large swathes of policy change."

Speaking after a summit with key figures in the children's sector, he said: "We are absolutely committed to the children's agenda, seeing children and schools as a priority. We will continue to treat this as a priority and fight our corner to get as fair a share of funding as we can." But he was unable to comment on possible future cuts.

Ennals, who was knighted at the weekend in the Queen's Birthday Honours, issued a call for certainty from the government and the opposition. He said that without clarity on where cuts would apply, children's trusts were already having to make budget cuts "simply on the basis of what makes sense".

Ennals said it was "not at all helpful" that neither party is willing to talk about exactly where cuts will come from. He said: "Funding for schools remains ringfenced and more money is going into child protection services because of increases in the number of children in care being referred. It means the early intervention services are becoming very fragile."

The Conservatives have already said they would scrap the £224m information sharing database ContactPoint if they win the next election.

Gemma Tetlow, senior research economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said: "Whoever is in government is going to face some difficult decisions. What we don't have is detail on where these cuts will come from."

Earlier this week, shadow chancellor George Osborne accused Labour of being "dishonest" about how public spending will have to be cut.

Children's Secretary Ed Balls responded by claiming the opposition is committed to cutting spending by a "devastating 10 per cent on education and children's services".