Children’s Services

Lucy Allan Excerpts

Tuesday 12th December 2017 Westminster Hall

[Fiona Onasanya (Peterborough) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the provision of children’s services by local authorities.

It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to debate the provision of children’s services by local authorities. My reason for introducing the debate is that I understand that the pressures facing children’s services are rapidly becoming unsustainable, with the combination of Government funding cuts and huge increases in demand leaving many areas struggling to cope.

More and more vulnerable children are in need of care. Children’s charities, including Barnardo’s, the Children’s Society, Action for Children, and the National Children’s Bureau, have described a crisis facing children’s services, highlighting that central Government’s decision to deny councils funding is affecting the quality of vital children’s services. Councils have suffered a 40% cut in funding since 2010, leaving them unable to meet soaring demand and to provide safe, effective children’s services. Local authorities overspent on children’s services by £365 million in 2014-15, and by a further £605 million in 2015-16. That overspend shows how dire the situation is for them, and that the funding is insufficient.

Due to cuts, one in three Sure Start centres have closed since 2010. There are now more than 1,240 fewer designated Sure Start children’s centres. 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 every day.

[Lucy Allan (Telford) (Con)]

The hon. Lady is to be congratulated on moving this important motion and I am grateful to her. I hope she will join me at a later stage in introducing a Backbench Business Committee debate so that this extremely important motion can be debated more fully. Does she agree that it is a stain on our society that we have so many children being taken into state care, and that the focus is on taking children from their families, rather than on preventive measures that would enable them to stay safely at home?

[Fiona Onasanya]

I agree, but local authorities need to have funds to invest in resources to make prevention a possibility. We cannot keep cutting their funding and expect them to do more with less. I would be more than willing to join a Backbench Business Committee debate, but the issue that I am seeking to highlight is that the funding strategy is failing our local authorities.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Goodwill]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. I visited the Pause programme in south London, which works with women who may become pregnant and have their children taken into care regularly, to break the cycle that makes life so difficult for them and, of course, for the children who have to be taken into care. It is an innovation that saves money. I was told that for every £1 invested in the programme in Greenwich, they save £5 in other interventions. Life is much better for those women. I met a number of women who had been involved in the project.

That is not to say that the system is delivering across the board or that we have achieved success in achieving our vision of a country where all children are protected from harm. There are still too many examples of young people and their families being let down by poor-quality services. My Department continues to take action to intervene where performance is not good enough.

[Lucy Allan]

Is the Minister aware of the comment from the chief executive of the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service that there are children in care unnecessarily—children who would not be in care if they had the help that is available in some parts of the country? The inference is that the service is very patchy and that a child might end up in the care system, when elsewhere in the country there would be sufficient investment to help protect them and keep them safely at home.

[Mr Goodwill]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We have authorities that have dramatically reduced the number of children being taken into care by making early interventions. That saves money, makes the local authority more cost-effective and is the sort of innovation that we want to spread around the country, from the good or outstanding authorities to the other authorities that are, unfortunately, letting down too many children and not spending the hard-earned taxpayers’ money deployed for their use as effectively as they might. We need to improve the standard of children’s social care in so many authorities where they are not delivering as well as elsewhere.

We have strengthened our approach to intervention in cases where councils are failing to provide adequate services for children in need of help and protection, looked-after children or care leavers. That programme of intervention is yielding real results. Some 36 local authorities have been lifted out of failure since 2010 and we are seeing a positive impact from the independent children’s social care trusts that we have set up in Doncaster and Slough. We also have great examples of local authorities, such as Leicester City and West Berkshire, that have turned their services around at an impressive pace, underlining what can be achieved with a relentless focus on improvement along with the right help and support. I am of course pleased with such results, but I am not complacent—we will continue to act swiftly in cases of failure and to act decisively to ensure improvement is happening everywhere in the system.

We have identified £20 million to be invested in improvement support to help create a system of sector-led improvement, founded on systematic and effective self-assessment and peer challenge. We have enjoyed real success in working with sector partners on that. Together, we are testing a system of regional improvement alliances that will, in time, spread to the whole country and enable a robust system of support and challenge between local authorities, supported by key partners such as Ofsted and my Department.

We are expanding our partners in practice programme. Our PiPs, as they are familiarly referred to, are excellent local authorities whose children’s services are secure and whose leadership is strong. For a few years now, the partners have been pioneering excellent practice and working systematically to spread it across the system. They are a model of good practice, not seen from a distance but working hand in hand alongside teams in other authorities that want to learn and improve their own practice. For example, North Yorkshire, my own excellent Conservative-controlled local authority, is working with other councils to diagnose problems and agree on what support is needed, extending practical help to nine areas across the country. We aim at least to double the number of partners in practice in the current expansion application process. That will ensure we have dedicated teams of excellent practitioners, with additional capacity built into their council, which enables them to get into struggling authorities and offer practical, on-the-ground support to help them to improve their service provision.

It is clear that much has already been done to ensure that every penny spent on children’s services is being spent effectively on delivering good outcomes for vulnerable children.