The problems faced by England’s children’s services described in the Guardian’s investigation – buckling under the weight of youngsters taken into care and struggling to help vulnerable families in need – are shocking if not surprising. This is a crisis that has been long brewing. The pandemic has made it even more acute.
Three years ago, the Conservative MP and former children’s minister Tim Loughton highlighted the consequences of the “woeful underfunding” of children’s services. He said: “In some places, the pressure … is so acute it is leaving social workers feeling that the only tool available to them to keep a child safe is to remove them from their family.”
The tools social workers lacked were family support services, which have been eviscerated by austerity cuts. As a result social workers might fail to spot families in difficulty early on; when alerted, they had little to offer them. Problems that could have been sorted early – a teenager going off the rails, a stressed-out young mother or father – spiralled into major crises.
In 2010, 64,370 children were taken into care in England. By 2020, this had increased to 80,080, a 24% rise. The more children that came into care, the fewer resources were available for preventative services. As the head of the children’s care review, Josh MacAlister, puts it, councils are “trapped in a cycle of crisis intervention”.
The crisis is most prevalent in deprived areas, where children are far more likely to be in care, and austerity cuts have been harsher. In Blackpool, 224 children in every 10,000 are in care. In Middlesbrough, it’s 189. Compare those with Wokingham in leafy Berkshire (24 per 10,000) or affluent Richmond-upon-Thames (27 per 10,000).
But it is not limited to the poorer parts of northern England and the Midlands: it’s acutely present in the wealthy shires, too. Research has shown that a child living in a deprived pocket within a wealthy area is 50% more likely to be taken into care than a child in an equally deprived neighbourhood in a poorer area.
The financial impact on council budgets has been catastrophic. Typically, top-tier councils spend up to 70% of their entire budget on adult and children’s social care, sucking up so much resource that authorities are forced to divert cash from – or shut down – so-called non-core services such as libraries, parks, museums and leisure centres to pay for child protection.
A chunk of that spend has been on eye-wateringly pricey children’s home placements, 80% of which are provided in the private sector. Fewer than one in 10 children in care are in residential homes but a place can cost up to £250,000 a year. As an astonished Lord Adonis, a former looked-after child himself, said in a recent parliamentary hearing: “This makes Eton, Westminster and Winchester [schools] look cut-price.”
For all the turmoil within local authorities, the backdrop to the crisis has been rising poverty, especially families in “deep poverty” trying to survive on incomes 50% below the breadline. Food bank staff tell of the parents loth to accept food parcels, petrified their inability to afford to buy food will see their children taken away from them for neglect. Tackling poverty and children’s social care, say experts, go hand in hand.
There is a near-consensus that children’s services need more funds. But some want investment to be part of a wider, more ambitious post-pandemic approach to children’s welfare. As the president of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, Charlotte Ramsden, asked recently: “Where is the national plan for children?”
