Patrick Butler writes in today's Guardian that spending
cuts are forcing local authorities in Britain to focus their resources on
reactive, crisis intervention (such as child protection) at the expense of
preventative work with children and families.
The study he describes, by the Family and Parenting Institute, also found substantial increases in demand for local authority children’s
services at a time of budget restraint.
One of the eight councils in the study had experienced a 70%
increase in referrals to children's social care in18 months and a 50% rise in
child protection cases. Smaller, but nevertheless significant, rises were more typical.
Big increases in the numbers of children taken into care contributed to the
pressure to find money that the councils simply did not have.
Achieving the right balance between preventative early intervention
and responding to crises is vital to the provision of effective services. We
all know that under-spending on prevention can be a false economy, particularly
with the very high costs that are incurred if a child has to be taken into
care.
Government has to take responsibility. It is no good simply
saying that cuts across the board are inevitable if all concerned know that a
saving made in preventative services now will result in unavoidable increased
expenditure on reactive services later. That is just hypocrisy. Public sector
spending needs to be planned in a reasonable way and the consequences of cuts
in one service need to be assessed for their impact on other services.
Otherwise the inevitable result is that services decline while at the same time
the expected savings are not made. That is an outcome that no sensible person
could support.
