Children’s Services

Fiona Onasanya 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.

[Marsha De Cordova (Battersea) (Lab)]

I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend on securing today’s debate. Does she agree that the last seven years of cuts to children’s services have had a negative impact, leading to the closure of Sure Start centres and more children going into care, and that that impact has fallen disproportionately on poorer children?

--- Later in debate ---

[Fiona Onasanya]

I absolutely agree. The fact that we are cutting vital funds to local authorities has a direct impact on the services that can be provided, and those whose families are from an impoverished background are disproportionately affected.

[Jo Platt (Leigh) (Lab/Co-op)]

I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend on introducing the debate. Does she agree that it is not just children who are in crisis, but families? The cuts to early intervention and prevention grants in my area of Leigh have led to a rise in drugs and alcohol abuse, homelessness and mental health issues, which affect both children and adults.

[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.