In the draft Local Government Finance Settlement last November, the government proposed to put £250mn into a new Children’s Social Care Prevention Grant, a one-off grant to invest in the national rollout of “family help”, prevention services and child protection reforms.
Following a three-month consultation, where 44% of respondents backed the proposals and 16% disagreed, the government has announced it is to push ahead with its plans and will uplift funding by a further £20mn to implement family-group decision-making measures included in the recent children’s social care white paper Keeping Families Safe, Helping Children Thrive.
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The government has now published details on what the Children’s Social Care Prevention Grant can be used for – covering services that “should support families to overcome challenges at the earliest opportunity, prevent escalation and effectively intervene with high-risk problems” – and how much each local authority will receive.
The average grant is worth £1.76mn, but allocations range from £6.7mn for Kent County Council to £30,000 for the City of London.
Grants have been allocated based on a children’s needs funding formula which estimates need for children’s social care services, considering the variation in the cost of delivering services and the ability of local authorities to raise resources locally.
However, nearly a quarter of consultation respondents disagreed with the funding formula used by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to decide the allocations.
The Department for Education will set out further details on the distribution methodology of the grant and the development of a new relative needs formula for children’s social care following the conclusion of the local authority funding reform consultation and the multi-year funding settlement in the Spending Review.
