LGA chief warns shrinking council budgets threaten early intervention

Writing in CYP Now as part of an exclusive special report on children’s services funding, David Simmonds warned that reducing bureaucracy and duplication alone would not save enough money to protect preventative services.

“We must not allow the debate about council funding to concentrate on efficiency savings alone,” he said. “This won’t provide the answer to all our funding pressures. Children’s services departments are facing growing pressures in demand with the mini baby boom of the past decade, rising referrals to children’s social services and record numbers of court requests to take children into care.

“Already stretched teams tasked with carrying out this challenging and difficult work are seeing workloads increase year-on-year. With a statutory duty to protect every child in need, councils are rightly committed to providing as much resource as possible to safeguarding. But this commitment leaves some challenging choices elsewhere, particularly in investment in early intervention services.”

Simmonds urged central government to enter into a “sensible and realistic conversation” with councils and residents about which children and young people’s services can be sustained within the funding that will be available in future.

“The money available to fund all council services aside from waste and social care is likely to shrink by 90 per cent in cash terms by 2020,” he said.

“To manage within a significantly smaller funding envelope, councils may have to significantly reduce service levels and consider cutting entire services. Children’s services are not immune to this.”

Debbie Jones, president of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, warned that the volume of work facing councils is increasing at a time when “society also has rising expectations on the quality of services provided, whether it is services for those with special educational needs, in children’s homes or the family justice system”.

“It is right that we should have the highest ambition for the quality of services, but we must also acknowledge that such improvements come at a price and take time to implement,” she said.

“The special educational needs proposals are a particular cause for concern as they increase what parents expect the system can provide, without any realistic prospect of controlling the costs of such provision. The adversarial system in which parents and local authorities tussle over care packages will only worsen if expectations rise while budgets shrink.”

She said there are “significant opportunities for savings” in reducing duplication and increasing partnership working, but argued “changes to policies in health and in schools are making this more difficult”.

“If it was difficult to negotiate a pooled budget with one primary care trust; it is almost impossible with several clinical commissioning groups, let alone across a wide range of providers,” she said.

“Similarly, as schools become accustomed to even more control over their own funding, including capital spending and use of the pupil premium, and as free schools pop up in places with lower levels of need than elsewhere, it is increasingly hard to pursue a strategic direction that secures value for money and financial probity across the education system and broader services for children and families.”