The next Comprehensive Spending Review is likely to be launched next month, laying out the government’s budget until 2025/26.
Despite previous concerns that reforms put forward by the government-commissioned review will not receive any extra funding, MacAlister has put forward three priorities for funding in an open letter to the Education Secretary and Chief Secretary to the Treasury Steve Barclay.
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These are family help, homes for children in care and mental health support for children in care.
MacAlister explains that while he is unable to “provide findings or recommendations at this stage”, he states that “there is no situation in the current system where we will not need to spend more to make it sustainable”.
“The choice is whether this investment is spent on reform which achieves better outcomes and long term sustainability, or props up an increasingly expensive and inadequate system,” MacAlister adds.
He reiterates that since work began on the review in March, more than 1,000 people with personal or professional experience of the children’s social care system have submitted evidence and advice to the review, shaping his priority areas for funding.
MacAlister calls for a cross-government approach to funding help for families “to avoid adding new programmes or additional pots of funding into the system”.
“Help should be available to any family that is facing significant challenges that could pose a threat to providing their child with a loving, stable, safe family life,” he adds.
Investment should include families of disabled children and kinship carers, the chair says.
He notes that the review is “considering all options” around a “broad re-think” of the children’s residential care system but highlights the need for urgent investment in the sector “to stabilise and address urgent areas of need ahead of any significant reform”.
“The current system is extremely fragile, with pressures on secure accommodation, issues with children being sent many miles from their families and communities – including English children being placed in Scotland – and a severe lack of homes that can meet the needs of teenagers,” the letter states.
Unaccompanied asylum-seeking children and those with complex needs must be considered in any funding offered, it adds.
“I have been told time and again since I began the review that many children in care are suffering from extremely poor mental health and struggling to get meaningful support,” MacAlister writes, calling on ministers to use the Spending Review to fund targeted mental health support for “this uniquely vulnerable group of children” as part of the next Covid-19 recovery package.
Responding to the letter, Matt Buttery, chief executive of evidence-based parenting programme Triple P, said: “It is so encouraging to see the direction of travel of Josh McAlister’s independent review of children's social care.
“In particular, he has drawn a clear link between how both social care and children’s mental health are currently afflicted by the same issue – the loss of high-quality family help that both builds on families’ strengths, and which reduces and acts as a buffer against immediate escalation to higher intensity services.”
