Invest to save is better – Fiscal rigidity and reduced use risks the residential reset we need.
The residential child care sector is dominated by generalist homes, a better description than ‘mainstream’. It is widely held we do not have the ‘right sort of homes’, look at local and national government and regulator public statements.
New entrants join existing providers who have made provision for the widest range of needs to enable maximum occupancy, to meet financial demands, wages, repayments, profits.The latter drives new provision, a guaranteed return from local authorities meeting their statutory responsibilities.
Voluntary organisations have the same demands but the words used differ, profit becomes surplus, which may be used elsewhere in the organisation but also to repay the financing perhaps from social capital sources, these too increasingly requiring ethical inquiry.
The recent large philanthropic donations to kick start new provision cannot be a continuous stream of finance. Whilst they enable voluntary organisations to have the burden of investment removed they load still further the local authorities budgets by providing services and provision. Such cash services may provide a vital sustaining of voluntary organisations perhaps wider than the residential source. They may offer yet more generalist provision, or alternative provision such as supported accommodation. Ofsted have been alarmed at the inappropriate use of this sector, children in need of high levels of care being placed.
It seems the institutional memory has been lost, that voluntary organisations exited children’s homes provision because of reputational risk. What is it that now that attracts them back when the risks if anything have increased? Externally and without current experience, as many of today’s voluntary organisations are, residential child care can look so easy – till you have to do it.
And of those who can do it, in any if the ownerships, who have seasoned ‘knowhow’, there does not seem any waning of the exodus of these knowledgeable and experienced people leaving the sector vowing “no return’.
This leaves professional practice leadership and, vitally, the containment of anxiety in a threadbare condition. Yet these are a precondition if the sector is to provide the ‘right sort of homes’.
Investing, to save, is necessary to create the specialist provision that is needed. Investing might retain this important cohort of people.
The greater the co-occuring needs accepted or the higher frequency and intensity the greater the specialism and the greater the vulnerability to ‘voids’, beds unfilled, affecting sustainability. This is not attractive to inward investors
The result of the Care Review implemented by the Children’s WellBeing Bill will mean cuts to services, especially the children’s homes sector. The thinking is early intervention will reduce the need for residential care. A reduced use and fees funding early intervention is mistaken
As soon as cuts happen investors will take unplanned flight, exiting. It is a shadow stalking Wales.
The welfare cuts announced will continue, even exacerbate, poverty and deprivation. No amount of early intervention can match these twins.
Earlier intervention does make a difference when it is strong and invested in both financially and professionally.
However the learning from Family First trials in the past few years is that the knock on effect is that it potentially delays children coming into care but by the time they did they had received many different “therapeutic” interventions and they rocketed through foster carers and then went to high cost residential resources. This is the foreseeable result of the current ideas.
However, what is before us with the Care Review and Children’s WellBeing Bill is worse than this recent scenario because there will be a reduced generalist residential safety net. And still not the ‘right sort’ of specialist homes
Fiscal rigidity and reduced use risks the residential reset we need. The reset resulting in specialisms comes through growth, through careful planned investment.
You can do price or quality. You can’t do both.
You can do profit or practice. You can’t do both.
You can do provision or providers. You can’t do both
Meeting the fiscal rules now means paying the costs, emotionally, of children, and financially, by all of society, in the next parliament.
It is clear. Not doing what is needed costs. Investment saves.
People who know this won’t say it as they jeopardise their jobs and services. NCERCC as an independent voice funded by ourselves can speak truth to power.
The government have it the wrong way round. reduce residential; increase early intervention; address poverty. Everyone knows this, and the evidence is clear, is wrong.
The right way to get the ‘right sort of homes’ is to end child poverty, fund the development of specialist provision over 5 years meanwhile developing early intervention, but not mistake the latter will do away with the former. That thinking is made by the inexperienced with the level of needs currently, but will please ideologues and bean counters.
In whatever way you take the phrase, invest to save.
