Increase in council budgets for children’s services ‘highlights need for reform’
Fiona Simpson
Monday, August 15, 2022
An increase in local authorities’ children’s social care budgets for 2022/23 highlights an “urgent need” for funding recommendations made in the Care Review to be implemented, sector leaders have said.
Latest figures from the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) show that the planned expenditure for local authorities on children’s social care for the current financial year amounts to £11.2bn.
This is an increase of £348m on the previous year’s budget.
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The figures also show a cumulative overspend of £381m on children’s services across all councils in 2021/22 when a budget of £10.8bn was forecast.
The increase in planned expenditure on children’s social care in 2022/23 highlights “the urgency for reforming children’s social care”, a spokesman for the Local Government Association said, warning that without changes to funding councils will be forced to “plug gaps” including workforce retention and family help in order to support children in crisis.
It also “underlines a need for government to work with councils and move quickly to address the issues raised in the recent independent review, in particular workforce shortages and a lack of suitable homes for children in care”, the spokesman added.
The Care Review, which was published in May, says that “a temporary injection” of £2bn is needed to reduce high levels of children entering care and support local authorities to offer early help services to vulnerable families.
“By 2030, this will have achieved a complete rebalancing of spending within the system so that over £1bn more every year is spent on Family Help. After the five-year reform programme, there should be a dedicated ring-fenced grant to ensure this extra spending continues to be prioritised in the long term,” it states.
Chris Munday, chair of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services resources and sustainability policy committee, said the DLUHC figures show that “local authorities are having to prioritise spend on children’s social care to support those who need it”.
“This is challenging for local authorities who continue to make increasingly difficult decisions about many services that children and families rely on including early help and prevention services that can reduce demand for statutory child protection services,” he added.
Munday notes that the review found that the children’s social care system is “under-resourced” that the children’s placements market is “broken”, putting children in care at risk of having poorer outcomes than their peers.
“We urgently need a sustainable, long-term funding settlement for children’s services and government intervention into the placements market, otherwise children’s outcomes continue to be placed at risk. We urge the new Prime Minister to prioritise spending on children, they are our present as well as our future,” he said.