Addressing delegates at a Labour conference fringe event, Caroline Abrahams, special adviser to shadow education secretary Ed Balls and former lead for children and young people at the Local Government Association, warned that child protection services need more investment.
"The scale and nature of the impending cuts are a real threat to child protection," she explained. "Prevention and early intervention are on the agenda but those things take money."
She added that redundancies in children’s services could weaken safeguarding.
"Your system is only as good as your weakest spot," she said. "Everybody working in the system is thinking about their jobs, thinking about making staff redundant. They won’t necessarily be focused on the job in hand, which is keeping children safe. That frankly is a child abuser’s paradise."
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