The number of vulnerable children needing support from Greater Manchester’s social services departments is soaring, an M.E.N. investigation has found, leaving town halls facing a growing financial black hole.
Rising family poverty and its associated issues - including mental health problems, addiction and neglect - are seeing more and more children being referred into the care system, while the cost of accommodating children goes through the roof.
The children’s commissioner for England has now warned that town halls need an emergency cash injection from ministers, adding that failure to act could be ‘catastrophic’ for children.
Anne Longfield told the M.E.N. many youngsters are not now getting basic help early enough due to the pressures on children’s services departments and cuts to other areas of support such as youth centres and Sure Starts.
The government has a ‘moral imperative’ to urgently address the situation, she said.
Councils in other parts of the country, including Northamptonshire, Torbay and East Sussex, have all hit the national headlines recently after cutting their services to the bare minimum due to extreme funding pressures.
But an M.E.N. analysis of children’s services budgets across Greater Manchester shows most are now also unable to balance the books, between them facing a shortfall of at least £25m a year due to soaring pressures.
Official government figures for the numbers of children in care only run up to March 2017, but in Manchester, Tameside and Oldham alone - where all three councils are struggling to recover from damning Ofsted inspections and all are under particular financial pressure - there has been a 13pc increase since then, with around 2,500 children now in the system across the three boroughs.
Most Read
During the year to March 2018, Stockport saw a 23pc rise and Wigan a 7pc increase, while Bolton saw a 9pc rise in the year to last December.
In Oldham, the number of children being flagged as potentially at harm DOUBLED last year.
The biggest financial black hole is in Manchester, which has been running a £10.5m overspend as it struggles to find homes for the rising numbers coming into the system.
Costs for care home places have also risen 25 percent, as councils across the country compete to buy up spaces in the north west.
Oldham - which we revealed earlier this month is now facing an ‘intolerable risk’ due to rising demand and lack of experienced social workers - is £3.4m overspent, Tameside by £8m, Salford and Bolton by £6m, Bury £3.2m and Stockport £4.5m.
Garry Bridges, executive member for children’s services in Manchester, said the town hall - like most others - is facing a perfect storm.
“Families are under more pressure than ever - with benefit cuts, rising homelessness and more people forced to use food banks,” he said.
Don’t miss
“This rising poverty puts families under more pressure and adds to demand on our services.
“Places for the children in our care are more and more expensive within a national market which cannot adequately meet demand, and despite this our staff continue to work extremely hard to find places that are able to care for our children and meet the complexity of their needs.
“Against this background of rising demand and costs, government austerity forces cuts to councils which hit children’s services budgets hard. Keeping children safe is one of the most important things any council does and the pressures facing children’s services is an often unseen consequence of government cuts to councils.
“All of the evidence is clear that early intervention and support with families is best, but the relentless cuts to councils like Manchester make it harder to invest in early help and support.”
Budget reports to councils across the conurbation describe similar patterns of rising demand and soaring costs for care placements, most of which are provided by the private market.
There is a particular shortage of places for children with complex needs, such as those who self-harm, are violent or have significant disabilities.
In Stockport, the number of children being placed in care shot up by 23pc in the last year, while those on a care plan has risen 60pc.
But despite the borough having one of the highest numbers of care homes in the country, the council is having to compete with other authorities for those places.
“This is a very serious problem because half of all the children’s homes across the north west accommodate children not from the area,” said Coun Colin Foster, children’s services lead for Stockport council.
“We have had situations where social workers have had to chase around to find places for Stockport children - and the absolute irony is that the borough has got the highest concentration of children’s places.”
The cost to Stockport council of placing a child in residential care has risen 47pc in the last year, he added.
In Bolton, the number of children coming into the system rose by 10pc in the year to December, with the council also noting an increase in the complexity of the issues they were dealing with.
Wigan is one of only two councils - the other being Trafford - not reporting an overspend, but even there the town hall says it is also seeing rising numbers of complex problems, which is ‘significantly’ adding to financial pressures.
Salford council is overspending by about £6m a year, with council boss Coun Bill Hinds noting at a recent meeting that ‘you can’t turn away kids going into care’ just because money is tight.
A major driver for its overspend - as in other parts of the region - is the placing of children outside the city due to a lack of homes. Accommodating children far away from their hometown has been linked to a greater likelihood of them running away.
Coun Lisa Stone, lead member of children and young people’s services, said: “Salford has a growing young population and as a result the demand for support for children, families, children in our care and those with special educational needs and disabilities has increased.
“At the same time the government continue to cut our core funding - with cuts of £198m since 2010 - and residents are struggling with the impact of austerity and welfare reforms driving families into poverty.
“Despite government cuts to our budgets, we have invested an extra £4.5m in children’s services this year to meet demand and are working hard to deliver the best services possible within our resources, working closely with a range of partner organisations to do this.”
In Oldham, a leaked report revealed by the M.E.N. earlier this month referred to ‘unsustainable levels of increasing demand’ and high social worker caseloads. Referrals to the department have almost doubled since March 2016, at the same time as the council struggles to improve in the wake of a damning Ofsted inspection.
The town hall is running a £3.4m overspend and has taken a further £8m out of reserves to plough into the service. Oldham also has the highest national average figure for children going missing from care.
Oldham council bosses said they know more needs to be done to make the service better, and they are investing in their staff and striving to reduce their workloads.
In next-door Tameside, the council ran an £8.6m overspend last year in the face of ‘unprecedented demand’, with the numbers of children coming into the system rising by a fifth in the last year.
The department was handed an inadequate rating by Ofsted in 2016 - two years after Manchester’s received the same verdict and a year after Oldham - and has been trying to improve ever since.
Up until 2015 it had been seeing a drop in referrals, at which point the service was ‘cut to the bone’ due to austerity, according to Coun Oliver Ryan, lead member for children’s services at Tameside.
“Then we had an explosion of demand,” he added.
“What we said in 2015, right up to the point where we got that judgement from Ofsted, there was just a huge spike in the demand because of austerity.
“You can make the argument that if you cut money from services that deal with family or domestic abuse, or drug or alcohol misuse it all gets shunted to another service where it eventually implodes.”
Bury council is currently facing an overspend of around £3m, with a particular pressure, as elsewhere, caused by the complexity of the problems suffered by the children being referred.
Town hall leader Rishi Shori said the department’s budget is under ‘extreme pressure’.
“In line with most other local authorities we have seen an overall reduction in the budget without the corresponding reduction in the demand for our services,” he said.
“Last year we saw a rise in our numbers of looked after children and a rise in the number of referrals to social care.
“In addition, all local authorities now have responsibilities for care leavers up to the age of 25 and whilst this is the right thing to do, there was no additional money to meet the financial pressure.
“We strive to ensure that all children and young people receive the services to keep them safe and meet their needs, but as the number of children who require services rises, the budget is not able to keep pace.”
Children’s services in Rochdale, where social services were at one point constantly in the spotlight thanks to the town’s grooming scandal, managed to break even last year thanks to several years of tight financial management, investment and a reduction in demand.
However over the last nine months referrals have shot up 12pc, leaving the service under ‘significant pressure’ and now facing a hefty overspend. Rochdale has tried to focus on early help that in some parts of the country has been axed under the cuts, with one official telling the M.E.N: “We can’t really afford to do it but we definitely can’t afford not to either.”
Rochdale also has particularly high numbers of unaccompanied child asylum seekers, the cost of whose care - as with care leavers - is not fully reimbursed by government.
Changes to legislation have also seen an increase in the duty placed on councils to look after children with special educational needs and disabilities, care that is often particularly expensive but, again, has come with no extra government money.
Anne Longfield, children’s commissioner for England, said the crises in councils such as Northants or East Sussex are ‘just the extreme end of the situation that virtually every council in the land is facing’, noting that the Local Government Association is forecasting a £2bn shortfall by 2020 in children’s services nationally.
At the same time many councils are, even now, trying to squeeze even more savings out of departments due to government austerity measures.
Meanwhile the closure of other services - for the same reasons - is also compounding the risks now facing children as a result, she said, with more and more youngsters now slipping through the net.
“There has been a 60pc reduction in Sure Starts and youth services, both of which are the big preventative services,” she told the M.E.N, pointing out that such low-level early help is what ought to stop children hitting crisis point and being placed in care.
“That takes away a safety net that means that the problems are left to develop and possibly escalate rather than be resolved.
“So there’s a big gap there in services - and what’s happening at the moment is a reduction in funding when demand is going up, meaning the decisions end up being about crisis.
“But the irony is the level of cost means the amount spent on children hasn’t reduced over the last ten years - it’s stayed the same, but fewer and fewer children are getting the help, which is unsustainable.
“I think there’s a moral question here that if you know how to reduce risk and prevent problems from developing for children, isn’t there a moral imperative to do it? “That’s something that obviously in my view needs to change. Not doing so could be catastrophic for children.”
The children’s commissioner is now calling for an ‘emergency payment’ from the government in its forthcoming spending review, combined with a wholesale overhaul to ensure more funding is spent on helping children before their situation becomes so dangerous that they have to be taken into care.
She also wants to see a review of the care home market in the north west, which takes children places by local authorities all over the country, pushing up the prices and often meaning youngsters have to be sent miles away.
“There’s two things,” she said.
“There’s the cost and the location.
“I’m really concerned that a lot of the care homes are in areas where accommodation is cheap and those are already deprived areas where there’s extra risk.
“And the cost within such a limited market is something councils can do little about. I think there needs to be a much greater assessment of the scale and scope of the market and whether it’s meeting the needs of local authorities who need stable places near to home that are of good quality.”
Greater Manchester has been working for some time on potentially procuring care placements as a bloc, in an effort to drive down costs.
Bury council leader Rishi Shori, who also leads for the conurbation on children’s services, said the region was ‘tightly focused’ on ‘securing residential capacity which is financially sustainable and meets needs’.
“Joint commissioning as an approach to securing sufficient accommodation remains part of the ongoing conversation,” he added.
Senior social services figures spoken to by the M.E.N. believe much of the increase in demand is due to more and more families just about getting by on the breadline, living hand to mouth - and then experiencing rising stress levels, addiction and domestic violence as a result.
But the children’s commissioner believes many of children who are just starting to become at risk do not get the support from social services many people might imagine, because there simply isn’t enough money in the system.
“Actually the reality is often they don’t get that help,” she said.
“I think the general public makes an assumption that if there’s severe mental health issues or addiction or even abuse, that social services will be stepping in to help but the reality is that increasingly they won’t.
“I think if the general public knew that, they’d be quite shocked by it and would want it to change.
“It can’t be children that carry the brunt and the risk.”
A government spokesman said: “We want every child to have the best start in life, with the opportunities and the stability to fulfil their potential, which is why we have made £200bn available to councils up to 2020 for local services including those for children and young people.
“We also provide a further £270 million for councils to develop improvements in their service and create innovative programmes to improve the lives of these vulnerable children.”