Talking over the water cooler – or in the staff room, or on social media – many people are saying that child protection services are getting worse. It is hardly surprising. Council funding has reduced by 40 per cent in the past five years and is dropping another 30 per cent in the years ahead.
Police budgets follow the same trend and local health commissioning budgets are now going the same way. But I have to admit that they have not deteriorated as fast or as obviously as I had expected. I believe, though, that we may now be approaching a critical point, where service failures will become much more evident.
When the age of austerity began four or so years ago, many of us predicted that it would take about three years before evidence of real crisis began to emerge.
The theory went like this. First, any service can lose about 10 per cent of its budget without too much pain, and we all knew of some services where money was being wasted. Most budgets had been growing in the years leading up to the recession, so the first round of cuts was just removing recent improvements.
Second, the biggest reductions were being made in early intervention services - early years support, play services, youth work and family support - and the negative impact of such cuts tend to appear two to three years down the line, and result in rising referrals and caseloads. Frontline services, social workers in particular, have been protected in most authorities.
Third, most councils start by trying to cut management posts rather than frontline services. There is normally some room for reductions there, but the impact normally appears down the line in reduced supervision, reduced information sharing, reduced partnership working and reduced forward-thinking to spot emerging problems before they become crises.
If this analysis was accurate, then we could have expected to see the wheels coming off the bus in the past year. To be frank, I am not sure that we have. Yes, the latest round of Ofsted inspections has been grading local authorities lower than four years ago, on average.
Yes, referrals and child protection caseloads are certainly rising now, as predicted by the decline in early intervention support, but we have not yet seen evidence of an increase in child deaths. The child protection scandals hitting the headlines seem largely to be historical cases from 10 or so years ago - events that occurred when budgets were generally healthier than today.
So were we wrong, four years back, to be predicting calamities? No - but I believe we may have got our timings a bit wrong. I recall how long it took after the huge investment in Sure Start for us to start to see evidence of improved outcomes in children - at least five years.
As the process reverses, with children's centres no longer offering universal coverage and the deepest cuts in services really appearing in the past year, we will still be benefiting from the investment of years gone by to keep the current generation of children safe. So the damage caused by today's cuts is being mitigated by the effects of the investment of the previous 10 years.
Talking to colleagues from all corners of the country, I am now detecting stronger danger signs. Multi-agency partnerships are finding it harder to secure the time commitments from colleagues - police and health staff have much less time to work with children's social care staff, and school staff are rarely given time to attend multi-agency meetings. Good information sharing takes time, and time takes money. Poor information sharing and poor supervision are the key systems failures that serious case reviews over the decades tell us can result in child deaths. And both these areas are now rapidly deteriorating.
To some extent, we have all become used to austerity. Another round of budget cuts does not arouse the same upset as it did at first. Frogs jump away from very hot water, but if they sit in water that gradually heats up, they do not notice the change and they boil. Are we like the frogs? Are we failing to notice as the temperature around us rises?
In some parts of the country, local safeguarding children's boards are wondering whether it is becoming their duty to sound the alarm, to state that their public services no longer have the budget to keep their population of children safe. Would this be shroud waving, especially as a general election creeps nearer?
The time has come for us to develop some objective criteria for what constitutes minimum child protection standards within an area. The needs of any one area naturally vary with their levels of social deprivation, but could we define, for example, how many GP sessions are needed per week, how many health visitors, how many police officers and how many social workers with now large caseloads? Should we define what services should be within easy reach? On the negative side, it could lead to areas chasing yet another set of performance indicators.
But it just might provide us with an objective way of knowing when we need to say, loudly and clearly, enough is enough.
Sir Paul Ennals is chair of Haringey's local safeguarding children board
