A gaggle of 12 ministers is due to consider how best to improve children's social work and "overhaul the way in which police, social services and other agencies work together". So now is the time for our sector to start producing some radical ideas in the hope that the civil servants (who are always the ones who lead such reviews) will think beyond the obvious. Let me get the ball rolling and set out two thoughts. First, let's take seriously the need to expand early help. Second, let's think afresh about how our services should be structured.
The last thorough review of child protection was undertaken by Eileen Munro for the coalition government, nearly five years ago. She recommended lots of changes, not all of which the government of the day agreed with. She said that prevention was better than cure, and that we should think about the causes of abuse and neglect rather than look at what actually happens to them.
But her most important recommendation was dropped - that local authorities should be required to offer "early help" services to a set level. Indeed, since 2011, the funding for early help services has been drastically reduced across the country (as CYP Now's research showed), and especially in the poorest areas. I recently visited a local authority area where the child population has increased by 16 per cent over the past five years, but where the funding available for children's services will have halved by the end of 2017. It makes no sense to think that child protection services there can simply continue as previously designed. Numbers of children in care continue to rise. If services are to survive the next five years, we must find a way of shifting focus more towards prevention and early help, and systematically reducing the number of children who need to be taken into care.
What about partnerships between areas? In recent years, all councils have had to reduce and reshape their services – and so too have police and health services. School budgets have so far been largely untouched, so the level of change there has been less. (Don't believe all you read about the impact of changes to academy status – for most schools, the change is minimal, and it certainly has had little impact for good or ill on the most vulnerable children.) But most councils have held back on really radical change, wondering if the recent election would produce a change of government and approach.
Now the future is clearer. Although the recent budget slightly reduced the speed of council cuts, the overall direction remains the same, and all public services know that the next five years will bring further reductions. It makes no sense any longer to put off some of the big ideas. Maybe now is the time to make real the idea of multi-agency working - of combining services across disciplines and across boundaries.
Are there some services that can be better run over a larger area? The new legislation intends to ensure that adoption services are organised regionally. Would fostering services also gain from being collectively organised by regional groupings of local authorities or by voluntary agencies? It is many years since family court services were taken out of the hands of local authorities and courts, and centralised - after several years of some muddle, the central service does seem to be showing real gains in quality in independence and in cost-effectiveness. Are there other services run by councils that could be handled the same way?
Could police services for children be reorganised similarly? In many parts of the country, child abuse investigation teams are structured separately from the rest of the police; is there a case for removing them entirely from local police structures and organising them on a regional or national basis? There is already discussion about merging separate police authorities into a smaller number, to give economies of scale.
Is there scope to merge some services across councils? The tri-borough arrangements in west London seem to have been working well, have saved money and seem not to have reduced effectiveness. In big cities, is there scope for groups of councils to explore merging their children's services? It is not simple, for certain - but many council boundaries have little relevance to local people. Local safeguarding children's boards also could benefit from some rationalisation.
And what about clinical commissioning groups (CCGs)? Nobody wants to see yet another major reorganisation across the NHS - but some areas have moved towards combining CCGs to improve efficiency. In the big cities, I can see strong arguments for further mergers.
Our current structures are creaking. Wherever I go, people are talking about how we need to look afresh; to reduce the number of organisations, reduce the boundaries across which people have to work and reduce the barriers to joint working. We have talked about designing services around children for a long time. Maybe now we should set about the task of making the rhetoric work.
Sir Paul Ennals is chair of Haringey's local safeguarding children board
