Children in crisis: the role of public services in overcoming child vulnerability
The Public Services Committee has published its report, Children in crisis: the role of public services in overcoming child vulnerability . In the report, the Committee establishes that the past decade has ushered in a crisis in child vulnerability, with over one million children in England currently growing up with reduced life chances. Our inquiry calls on the Government to act urgently to support vulnerable children, to allow them to go on to live productive, fulfilling and rewarding lives.
The number of vulnerable children is likely to have grown during the COVID-19 crisis. Our survey of 200 public services professionals found that more than 50% of their organisations had reported a rise in the last 18 months of the number of children and families requesting help with parental mental ill-health, or domestic violence and addiction problems within the home.
But our inquiry found that the crisis in child vulnerability has been building for many years, even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Already in 2019, the Children’s Commissioner's Office warned that 829,000 vulnerable children were receiving no support.
This is partly due to large reductions in early intervention funding that have gradually led to worse outcomes for vulnerable children over the past decade and higher costs for the taxpayer. Since 2010, funding for local authorities’ early intervention services, such as children's centres, family support and youth services, has been cut almost in half to £1.8 billion.
During the same period, the money spent on later, costlier, and higher-intensity interventions—such as children going into care, youth justice services or safeguarding—increased by more than a third to £7.6 billion.
Public services should be there when families first need help, not only when they reach crisis point. Early intervention has the potential to reduce the role of the state in family life by supporting parents to meet their children's needs, and to prevent temporary difficulties becoming enduring and entrenched problems.
To date, the Government has not recognised the need for a child vulnerability strategy. A national strategy would enable public services to assist as many children as possible to go on to live productive, fulfilling and rewarding lives.
The Spending Review 2021 committed £492 million in investment for early help services over the following three years. This is a welcome recognition that child vulnerability is best addressed through early intervention, but it will not make up for the £1.7 billion yearly reduction experienced since 2010.
The children living in our most deprived communities have suffered disproportionately from those cuts in funding. Walsall, for example, which has some of the highest levels of deprivation anywhere in England, saw early intervention spending fall by 81%. By contrast, Surrey, which has much lower levels of deprivation, saw funding drop by only 10%.
If ‘levelling up’ is to mean anything at all, these children and their families should be at its heart.
The Government has championed “Family Hubs”, which provide families with a central access point to integrated services, as effective providers of early help, but is yet to announce the full national roll-out of Family Hubs. Instead, it has committed to support just over half of local authorities to trial a limited number of new Family Hubs.
This falls far short of the vision set out in the Government’s own Early Year Healthy Development Review: that all families in England should have access to a Family Hub. Stronger commitments are necessary to repair the creaking public services infrastructure on which vulnerable children rely.
Our inquiry concluded that this crisis in child vulnerability requires urgent action from the Government. The report puts forward a number of recommendations:
- The Government should publish a national strategy on child vulnerability, supported by substantial, long-term investment in local early intervention services that will restore funding to its 2010 levels, prioritising the most deprived local authority areas.
- This investment should target early intervention specifically, to reduce the cost of lost opportunities in children’s lives.
- There must be greater emphasis placed on the need to share data between social services, the NHS, the police and schools in order to better identify vulnerable children and support early intervention.
- A joint framework must be developed to hold local agencies to account for how effectively they collaborate to improve long-term outcomes for children.
- Family Hubs play an important role in improving early intervention support. A national roll-out of Family Hubs needs to be at the core of a national strategy on child vulnerability.
- There should be a statutory duty on local authorities, the NHS and police to collaborate to improve children's life chances. Local statutory services should also work closely with the voluntary sector to identify and understand need in their areas.
Read the full report on our inquiry website or follow reaction on our twitter account at @LordsPublicSCom
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