Cliff edges speeding towards us

As I return to work this week following the optimism of the ADCS conference and the benefit of two weeks leave, my focus has returned swiftly to the perilous state of local government funding. As we know, fourteen years of austerity has had a significant impact on huge swathes of services. Regrettably, the hardest hit areas for many of us have been our early help services.

With significantly high levels of deprivation, Hull City Council has worked hard with local political support, and that of partners, to maintain a semblance of an early help offer. On the back of austerity, Covid-19 and a cost-of-living crisis, our early help offer has been a main vehicle in supporting families and combatting reactive and expensive statutory interventions. While relying on often small pots of funding, widespread and positive differences to our families and with our community partners have been achieved.

However, many of our early help services are wholly, or are in part, supported by a plethora of government grant funding streams. The situation is not helped by the frequent rounds of bidding for short term funding pots, delayed decision making and constant reviews, all of which syphon resource away from much needed frontline services. This calls for a different and brave approach that puts early help and prevention at the heart of local government funding.

We have had some sobering reflections this week in Hull, noting that unless decisions are urgently made at a government level, £7 million of grant funded children’s services, equating to 50 full time staff, will cease on 31 March 2025.

As a further example, across the Yorkshire and Humber region we undertook a review in the last year following the implementation of the new Supporting Families Framework. With shortfalls in payment by results due to extended targets and more effort required across partners to “mine” data to meet newly configured targets, there was an estimated loss of £6 million to families across the region. Surely there must be a better system that allows for this funding to reach the families where it is most needed.

SEND reforms, the eradication of profiteering from the care of our children and wider social care reform are huge ticket items and we know these matters will not be solved overnight. However, some decisions for 2025/26 are needed with significant urgency and no more so than grant funding which sees cliff edges speeding towards us in March 2025. At a minimum, we need to see a rolling forward of current grant arrangements for a further year. This will allow for the influence of ADCS on making the case for multi-year funding settlements thereafter, which hopefully puts early help and community support at the centre of a comprehensive approach to eradicate poverty for all children, which calls for a brave financial funding shift.