What you need to know
Total expenditure on children’s social care reached an estimated £12.7 billion in 2018/19, representing growth of 7.7% compared with the previous year, and an overall rise of just under £2 billion (18%) since 2014/15.
The 18% increase in expenditure between 2014 and 2018 was effectively stimulated by a 3% increase in the number of children requiring social care.
However, the LGA has estimated that English councils will face a £3 billion funding gap by 2025 with many services having already been stripped back or shut down. Over 1,000 children’s centres have closed since 2009, while 760 youth centres have shut since 2012.
Covered in this Report
Every local authority (LA) must protect and promote the welfare of children in need in its area. To do this, they must work with families to provide support services that enable children to be raised in their own families. In Northern Ireland, Health and Social Care Trusts (HSCTs) have a duty to safeguard and promote the welfare of children in need in their area.
Children’s social care services are generally situated within or alongside broader children’s services.
Local councils describe their children’s services by using a four-tier model, which may be represented as a pyramid or continuum of needs:
Tier 1: Universal services such as schools and health visiting.
Tier 2: Targeted services for children and families beginning to experience, or at risk of, difficulties; for example, school counselling, parenting programmes, and support for teenage parents.
Tier 3: Specialist services for children and families with multiple needs, such as intensive family support, and services for children with disabilities.
Tier 4: Specialist services for children and families with severe and complex needs, including child protection services, and looked-after children.
Children’s social care services sit within tiers three and four of this framework:
Non statutory services: Tier one and two services for cases with a lower level of need than children in need and looked-after children.
Statutory services: Tier three and four services for children in need, and looked-after children, as established in the Children Act 1989.
Social care services may include:
services for looked-after children, including fostering and residential care
court liaison and advisory services
adoption
child protection
family support
services for children with disabilities
Local authorities work with other bodies - such as the police, health and education services, and private and voluntary care providers - to meet their statutory duties.
The Department for Education (DfE) is responsible for the legal and policy frameworks within which children’s social care services operate.
The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government provides funding to LAs for children’s services.
However, excluding local government spending cuts, there are several reasons why LAs find it difficult to commission and provide services in the children’s social care market, and are instead outsourcing an increasing number of services to private and independent providers.
These factors include:
The markets are opaque and difficult to size with any degree of precision.
Demand is insufficiently visible to providers, while commissioners have limited market intelligence on suppliers.
Commissioners do not have good quality pricing and costing data, and are therefore unable to make proper comparisons and choices.
Commissioners rarely have the time or experience to engage in a proper dialogue with independent providers while also managing markets.
The necessary skills and capabilities to commission successfully are in short supply.
The industry still faces some public criticism by allowing private companies to provide children’s social care services as they are deemed to only do so to make the largest possible profit. This criticism arises from whether it is morally acceptable to financially benefit from the needs of the most vulnerable children in the UK – a debate that has only heightened in recent times.
The last Ofsted inspection in September 2018 found that 18% of privately-owned children’s homes were deemed to be below a ‘good’ standard, with 3% judged to have been run to an ‘inadequate’ standard - equivalent to 47 privately-run homes.
Holding private and independent providers to account is also more difficult as these providers release their information about performance. If found to be failing, it is hard to challenge private and independent dominance as LAs lose the capacity, or knowledge and expertise, to take services back into direct public sector management.
