Council spending on child protection and care surges by £280m
Joe Lepper
Friday, December 16, 2016
Council spending on child protection and children in care services has risen by £280m this year as local areas struggle to cope with increasing demand on services.
The extra spending has been revealed in Department for Education Section 251 figures detailing local authority expenditure across education and children's services.
The figures show the total expenditure for looked-after children services in 2015/16 is £3.94bn, up £173.1m on the previous year's figure. Between 2014/15 and 2015/16, spending on residential care has risen by £87.2m, fostering spend has increased by £27.3m and leaving care services saw a £18.9m hike in expenditure.
Total spending on safeguarding came to £2.22bn in 2015/16, an overall increase of £104.5m on the 2014/15 figure. This includes a £115.4m rise in spending on social work that has been offset by cuts of £8.51m on commissioning and children's services strategy, and a cut of £2.43m in spending on local safeguarding children's boards.
Details of council spending in 2015/16 come a week after the Association of Directors of Children's Services (ADCS) published its Safeguarding Pressures research, which detailed how a "toxic trio" of domestic abuse, parental mental health and parental substance abuse are leaving services stretched.
Also this month, the Independent Children's Homes Association warned that residential children's care was facing a funding crisis on a par with the financial problems affecting adult social care.
In September, England's most senior family court judge Sir James Munby said children's social care faced a looming "crisis" as councils and the courts struggled to cope with a record rise in care applications this year.
Meanwhile, the DfE's expenditure figures show spending on children's centres has fallen again. Sure Start spending fell by £101.5m from £945.5m in 2014/15 to £844m this year. This follows a £200m cut last year.
Youth services have also been hit, with the total spending on services cut by £99.1m. Spending on family support services is also down by £4.9m, while spending on youth justice is down £8.7m.
Ian Thomas, chair of the ADCS's resources and sustainability policy committee, said: "While the association has concerns about the reliability of Section 251 data, this latest dataset shows that councils continue to protect and invest further in statutory safeguarding services at the cost of early help and preventative services.
"We know from our own Safeguarding Pressures research that the needs of children and families are becoming more complex, neglect continues to be the most prevalent category of abuse in child protection plans and the impact of the ‘toxic trio' - of parental mental health, substance misuse and domestic abuse - continues to be a growing reason for the involvement of social care.
"As support services to help tackle these issues reduce, the window of opportunity to address the root causes of these problems closes.
"There will be huge financial and human costs for all local authorities as a result. We need to take a longer-term strategic view of how we invest in early intervention and prevention now, given that the LGA estimates children's services face a funding shortfall of £1.9bn by 2020."
