Children’s Services

Debate between Fiona Onasanya and Anne Marie Morris

Tuesday 12th December 2017 Westminster Hall

[Fiona Onasanya]

I agree. When we talk about funding for children, we have to look at the whole family, or at the whole child, so to speak. A child is not there in and of themselves—they come from a family. When looking at prevention, we need to look at how the child got into that position in the first place and what steps can be taken to support families, to ensure that they can be the support network that the child so vitally needs.

[Anne Marie Morris (Newton Abbot) (Ind)]

We have talked about this being a broad issue around the individual. Does my hon. Friend agree that social services have an impact not only on the child and the family, but in education? Not having support from social services for children with difficulties puts pressure on teachers, who are effectively having to pick up the challenge. Likewise, there is an effect on the NHS. Certainly in my part of the country in Devon, only one tenth of the overall mental health budget is spent on children. If there is no support in social services, the impact is inevitably on the NHS.

[Fiona Onasanya]

I agree. My concern, however, is that if we shift the focus solely to either the NHS or education, we are missing something, because preventive services that local authorities provide need to get in early. If funding is not there at the outset, that has a knock-on effect and affects education. Teachers have to be the parent and the teacher—raising the children rather than just teaching them. I have seen that even in my constituency of Peterborough, but we need to scale it back and look at the cause. If we start at the beginning and say that prevention needs to involve looking at children’s services, we need to ask what services we are offering the whole child and what services we can offer to the whole family. If we give support to the whole family when the child is school-ready, that should have a beneficial effect. We want to look at prevention, rather than just dealing with the consequences of the lack of funding.

As I said, the Local Government Association has forecast that children’s services face a £2 billion funding gap by 2020, serious child protection cases have doubled in the last seven years, and around 500 new cases are launched in England each day, yet no new money was given in the Budget for struggling children’s services. In my constituency of Peterborough, the local authority is set to lose another £30 million over the next three years and, as of 23 October this year, the Government grant had been reduced by 80%. Between 2010 and 2015, expenditure on services for children and young people fell by £7.8 million in real terms—a fall of 21.9%. I received email correspondence from a constituent named Tracie, who said:

“Social Services are a nightmare”.

Appointments are repeatedly cancelled and social workers do not reply to emails, because our local authorities are overstretched and underfunded. As I said, we cannot keep expecting them to do more for less.

On 31 March 2015, 1,860 children in Peterborough had been identified through assessment as being formally in need of a specialist children’s service. Furthermore, 354 children in Peterborough are being looked after by the local authority and 23% of those are living in poverty. We need sustainable forms of funding, based on the cost of delivering current and future services, and not regressively focused on past spending.