LGA study is basis for fairer funding debate
John Freeman
Tuesday, July 31, 2018
Having worked at a senior level in a shire county (Somerset), a large city (Birmingham), and a medium-sized unitary (Dudley), I didn't need research to tell me that they are all very different.
The recent Newton and Local Government Association (LGA) research on children's services, though, does put some much-needed evidential meat on the anecdotal bones, and puts the lie to claims that high spending can be largely explained by poor local political or management decisions (Deprivation is key factor affecting spending on children's services, CYP Now, July 2018).
The notion that high-spending local authorities could make "efficiencies" to greatly reduce spending has been shown up as absurd. That isn't to say that political leadership and creative management can't have any impact on costs as well as service effectiveness - of course they can - but there are no magic bullets. If there were, we would have found them long ago, and they would be well documented and widely used. In my time as a director, I did my best to seek out best practice, and one of the main virtues of the Association of Directors of Children's Services (ADCS) is that it provides a framework for sharing knowledge about what local authorities do and how they organise themselves. However, we all need to remember that "innovation" doesn't always work as hoped - it is important that we learn from failures as well as successes.
This latest research, then, is critically important in explaining the underlying variations in terms of deprivation, crime rates, disposable household income, unemployment and the size of the population under 26. None of this comes as a great surprise, but had this sort of work been available when I was working in Dudley, I would have looked closely at local authorities that were similar on these factors, not just our traditional statistical neighbours.
I hope the Department for Education or Ofsted, or failing that the LGA or ADCS, will now provide regular reports for local authorities based on "fair" comparisons. The report shows that only 13 per cent of the huge spending variation could be explained by practice and management differences - still worth addressing, but much easier to address once "fair" comparisons are routinely available.
The other key conclusion is that it busts the myth that there is enough money in the system. The £2bn gap is still there and it isn't going away. Alongside that, we must invest in long-term preventative services, not quick fixes, so that demand is reduced, and outcomes improved, over time. Surely it is obvious that investing to support children and families on the edge is in their and society's best long-term interests. Unfortunately, I fear that neither the Cabinet not the Treasury are giving much, if any, air time to children's social care and education. So we must use this research to push children's services into the national political debate which, up to now, has been much too focused on the NHS and adult social care.
- John Freeman is a children's services consultant and former DCS