Local Authority Grants: Impact of Cuts

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Thursday 9th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock]

My Lords, I am hugely tempted to take on the noble Lord, Lord Bates, and discuss the role of the global economy in the position in which we now find ourselves. I will resist that temptation. Perhaps we may do so over a drink at some point; I shall look forward to that.

Instead, disappointingly, I shall restrict my comments to the impact of cuts in local government funding on social care. My noble friend Lady Thornton has set out the context very clearly. I will focus specifically on the effect of the decision to front-load these cuts. The Government have made a choice to do that, and they must take responsibility for the consequences.

Within children’s services, the effect is that councils are increasingly going to focus only on delivering those services which statutorily they must. What will that mean in practice? In children’s services, it will mean focusing on child protection and meeting their obligations to looked-after children. That will be tough enough, but what about other services? Councils may wish to invest in family support services for children at risk but they have to make cuts fast. The risks of not investing in those services are obvious, but when cuts must be made now it is very difficult to choose to do that.

The risks of not investing in things like that are fairly obvious. There must be a danger that children will end up in care in future years who could have been diverted from that pathway had funds been made available for preventive services at an early stage. As well as it being a false economy, many Members of this House will be aware of the outcomes for children in care. The price that will be paid is considerable for some vulnerable young people.

Those noble Lords who attended the last meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Children, as I did, will have heard a moving story from a charity called Family Action about a Building Bridges project, which supports families whose parents are using mental health services and where the children are at risk or on the register, and maybe there are school attendance problems. One of the independent evaluations of this service showed that it works, and that the small cost of £3,500 saves local authorities more than £100,000 over two years. A similar story comes from Action for Children, another big children’s charity, whose East Dunbartonshire Family Service was evaluated as saving the state £2.64 for every £1 spent on preventing children going into care. However, these and many other services are at risk.

I am sure that many noble Lords have heard, as I have, repeated accounts of non-statutory services under threat, and that play provision is under threat all over the country, even though those kinds of services are mostly used by the most vulnerable families. I hear that most councils are now saying that they will not fund any mainstream youth work anymore. That is really significant. While I am grateful that the voluntary sector and the church, which provides much of the youth work in this country, will carry on doing that, it does not seem right that the state should be withdrawing from mainstream youth work. I hear from charities of cuts in provision for disabled children and of eye-watering cuts being considered in fostering and adoption. The potential damage is serious.

The noble Lord, Lord Bates, makes a serious point. Is it inevitable, or is it just special pleading? It is not inevitable. What these stories highlight is the need to give local authorities the breathing space to evaluate their cost drivers and to consider the impact of cuts, not just cut the things in front of them when they can do so immediately. I have talked recently to the senior officer of one authority, who had begun planning well ahead, as the noble Lord, Lord Bates, urged. In fact, the authority would not have cut things fast enough, even though it would have reshaped services, been more efficient and cut real costs and not simply spending. It now has to abandon all of that and move to immediate cuts to meet this timetable.

Briefly, on the impact on adult social care, I have always been concerned that when we talk about the importance of the freedom of councils to choose how to spend their money, we do not delude ourselves as to what choice they have in practice. Adult social care is, I understand, the single biggest discretionary area of spending by councils on services they deliver. If they have to cut back so quickly on the scale that we are discussing, they have no choice but to cut back on adult social care.

My noble friend Lady Thornton mentioned the raising of thresholds. That is an obvious thing to do. I read in Community Care magazine last week that Birmingham Council is becoming the first in the country to restrict formal council-funded care to people with critical personal needs. That is a very high threshold, as anyone who has worked in this field will understand. There is a real danger that the only people who will get any adult social care provided by their council are those with severe, multiple, complex conditions. Everybody else will be left to find it and fund it themselves. That is not a space we want to be in.

Finally, I will say a word about carers. My noble friend Lady Pitkeathley, who, as noble Lords will know, has been a long-time champion of carers, regrets that she cannot be here for the debate today. In her absence, however, I want to flag up the important contribution made by 6 million carers who save our country some £87 billion a year. Any future approach to social care needs to ensure that carers carry on being supported. I hope that the Commission for Social Care Inspection will make the contribution of carers an important part of its recommendations. I also urge the Government to look quickly at reviewing financial support for carers, including how future funding for respite care can be provided in the absence of ring-fencing.

What is to be done? Since spending on social care is such a big slice of local government spending, we are now seeing a disproportionate amount of the cuts in spending generally being carried by local government. Inevitably, a disproportionate chunk of that will be borne by social care. That means that vulnerable people who use social care services are picking up an unfair and disproportionate degree of the pain of the Government’s deficit reduction strategy. We need to look carefully at which individuals will actually be paying the price for those. They are those who use children’s services, those who use adult social services, children who are in need and children who live in care. These are some of the most vulnerable people in our society.

I am not simply asking for special pleading. I ask the Minister to do two things. First, will she please urge her colleagues to rethink the timescales and consider giving local authorities the space to be able to plan these steps more carefully? Secondly, will she please tell the House today what steps the Government can take to protect the investment in early intervention services of the kind I have described, much of it delivered by voluntary organisations, much of it successful, much of it saving the state money and much of it protecting lives? I urge her not simply to talk about spending on early intervention, since that will not be ring-fenced and will simply come out of the same pot. How does the Government’s strategy for ensuring that local services are delivered enable us to be confident that early intervention services for some of the most vulnerable people can be protected?