Spending Review should usher in consolidation on many fronts
Paul Ennals
Tuesday, December 8, 2015
So now we know for certain about the money.
The Spending Review will result in a further 24 per cent reduction in council budgets between now and 2020 - on top of the 40 per cent average reductions upto now. Police budgets better than we had feared. Public health money dropping further. Schools budgets tight, but not slashed. And more steps to ensure that the cuts will be deeper in the areas with higher levels of social deprivation.
As all public agencies prepare their budgets for next year, now is the time to prepare for the big reshaping that has been long inevitable. No longer can 152 councils sensibly stand apart and go through their separate programmes of cuts. No longer can we pretend that we can retain the current levels of child protection and support without the culling of some sacred cows.
The first sacred cow is that children's services should always be planned and delivered at the level of the local authority. The government has been promoting the idea that adoption services should be delivered regionally, and 140 councils have started planning for regional boards - with previous little opposition. New legislation entering parliament will allow the government to force the remaining councils to join. Aligning local authority provision with voluntary adoption agencies should increase placement choice, reduce the number of very small agencies (and therefore cut down on overheads) and allow examples of good practice in speeding up adoptions to be shared more easily. On the other hand, it might increase the number of placements outside local authority boundaries - but are we sure that this is a bad thing?
If we bring together the processes for assessment of adopters, assessment of children, matching activities and post-adoption support on a regional basis, are there other similar services that could do likewise? How sacred is the idea that foster care services should be retained within single authorities? There are already strong collaborations around the commissioning of residential care placements - could this go further?
Some people have felt that reducing local authority roles in these areas encourages greater private provision of placements. I am not so sure. Building strong relationships with trusted voluntary sector providers on a regional basis could open up opportunities for voluntary sector growth, or individual authorities on behalf of their colleagues. Co-ordinated commissioning of services, by groups of councils with an eye to long-term strategic needs in their region, could pull us back from the tendency in recent years for authorities to spot purchase care packages from private companies for individual hard-to-place children. Few councils have an appetite for running their own children's homes. I would like to see some of the larger children's charities returning to this area, where many of them first began.
What about the new sub-regional combined authorities we hear being discussed? More than 30 areas have brought forward plans to the Treasury for how groups of councils are keen to work together on topics such as economic development and transport. Some areas aim to take on health and social care; others are considering it. Is there scope to drive forward these new structures as a basis for commissioning and delivering some children's services in these new groupings? Many of the proposed combined authorities are still pretty small though - for example, the new Teesside Authority would only oversee the needs of a population of 600,000 - smaller than many existing local authorities.
Regional police authorities had been planning for a more difficult settlement - before the terrorist attacks in Paris made it politically difficult to cut police budgets. Plans had been drawn up to save money by combining several back office functions and to merge some regions. These plans should still be considered seriously, especially where proposals included the bringing together of some police frontline staff into multi-agency teams, working within Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hubs, child sexual exploitation or domestic violence teams.
There are more sacred cows we need to think about. CYP Now recently published research suggesting that the Nurse Family Partnership model of working with young mothers from challenging backgrounds is not showing an improvement in outcomes for the children, compared to the more standard health visitor delivery model. I thought smaller caseloads, with specially trained and well-supported staff following an agreed model, would help the young mothers and their children to thrive better. But if we believe in evidence-led policy, we shouldn't simply take the easy way out of saying "it is too soon to see the benefits". The projections had been for children to gain from the increased expenditure; if a robust research programme says they don't, we can't continue to justify putting extra funding into the programme.
The spring of 2016 is likely to be the toughest many of us have seen in 25 years. Few of the necessary decisions are easy. But we do no favours to the children and families we serve if we do not face up to the demands of spending the rapidly reducing budgets as effectively as possible.
Sir Paul Ennals is chair of the local safeguarding children boards in Haringey and South Tyneside