Erosion of 'lighter touch' preventative services for children happening despite government's commitment to early intervention.
Patrick Butler
Specialist social work aimed at helping at-risk families turn their lives around and avoid having their children taken into care is being dismantled by cuts and overwhelmed by soaring child neglect and family stress, a study has found.
Local authorities' children's services are increasingly forced to concentrate their depleted resources on crisis interventions - such as child protection plans, residential care and foster services - at the expense of family support, early years projects and youth clubs.
The erosion or closure of "lighter touch" preventive social services is happening despite the government's apparent commitment to early intervention, the detailed study by the Family and Parenting Institute (FPI) concludes. It says this "may well prove to be a false economy" because without help more vulnerable families may end up needing expensive acute services such as child protection.
The study found that demand for social work crisis services spiralled during two years of austerity, and that councils were struggling to manage. One unidentified council in the FPI study reported a 70% increase in referrals to children's social care in 18 months, alongside a 50% rise in child protection cases and soaring numbers of children being taken into care.
Another local authority reported a 5% increase in numbers of children going into foster care over the past two years.
The cost of funding rising pressures on emergency crisis intervention services was put at £3m by one council children's services department, at a time when it had to find cuts of £20m.
This "intensification of needs" was not just apparent in traditionally poor communities, one council reported, but also among families in more affluent neighbourhoods. This phenomenon, of social care services intervening in better-off families, was triggered by problems arising because "parents cannot afford to separate due to inflation, wage stagnation and exorbitant housing costs".
The report's authors emphasised that this example of increased social services need in affluent neighbourhoods was anecdotal and there was no hard evidence that it had become more prevalent or widespread.
Katherine Rake, chief executive of the FPI, said the study showed some cuts were storing up costly problems for the future. "'Lighter touch' universal services are perhaps an obvious target for short-term savings, but in practice this will only limit ability to intervene earlier, and more cost-effectively, with families."
Cuts mean children's services will in future cease to be universal but instead be increasingly tightly targeted at "troubled families" and children in the criminal justice system, the report says. It adds that managing those cuts will become harder. "There is little scope for introducing yet more efficiency measures that will not directly impact on the frontline or on services for the most vulnerable."
Eight local authority children's departments across four English regions were studied for the report. Five of the councils had above-average levels of deprivation, and the remainder below-average. Four were Conservative-controlled, three Labour and one had no overall control.
The study was completed before news emerged last month of the government's intention to abolish the £2.3bn early intervention grant allocated to councils in England. Councils have warned that this could lead to further cuts of up to 20% in funding for early years and family work from next April.
The FPI report echoes the findings of the Red Book 2012 report by the charity Action for Children, which runs hundreds of children's centres and family support schemes across the UK. Its survey of nearly a third of its frontline managers, published this week, found there had been an increase in the number of vulnerable families "on the brink" over the past 12 months as a result of welfare cuts and unemployment.
Almost two in three families it worked with were facing more severe problems with issues such as neglect, deprivation and mental health than they were at this time last year, the report found. The numbers of staff reporting cases of suspected child neglect had risen by 14%.
A funding squeeze meant Action for Children staff found themselves increasingly forced to focus on crisis intervention work rather than offering preventive services to families who were merely under pressure, it said.
Action for Children's chief executive, Dame Clare Tickell, said: "We welcome the coalition government's commitment to early intervention but the current system of short-term, quick-fix funding is simply exacerbating existing need and instability, creating a false economy that could cost society more than £1.3bn a year."
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