Budget cuts planned to early help services for Northamptonshire's troubled families

Early help services assisting troubled families in Northamptonshire and preventing children from being taken into care could be cut by almost a half.

Three early intervention contracts which include short term crisis placements, family intervention services and therapy for troubled teens could have their budget cut from £1.6m to just £940,000 in plans being taken to Northamptonshire county council’s cabinet tomorrow (July 14).

The proposed cuts could be a big blow to the service, which is rated as inadequate by Ofsted and is being overseen by a government appointed children’s commissioner.

On government orders the service is being hived off into an independent trust, with plans to have that in place early next year. The new contracts agreed will run for four years from April 2020 and be continued by the new trust.

The paper, which recommends delegating the awarding of new contracts to the director of services Cathi Hadley in consultation with children’s services portfolio holder Cllr Fiona Baker, says the cuts are being made after reduced government funding. The department overspent by £7.4m on its £116m budget in the most recent financial year, largely due to a reliance on agency staff and expensive out of county placements for children in its care.

The authority had 1,162 children in its care at the end of March – 23 more than in the previous quarter and a further 847 children were subject to child protection plans – a rise of 57 on the earlier three months.

Tomorrow’s paper says: “The contracts that require procurement are currently intensive and specialist tier 4 safeguarding intervention services. All three current contracts deliver services to families whose child/ children have an allocated social worker in the Safeguarding team and who are Children in Need (CIN) or are the subject of a Child Protection Plan (CPP).

“They are ‘invest to save’ services whereby the interventions are significantly less costly than the cost of a child or young person coming into care and the outcomes for children are likely to be better.”

Currently charity Catch 22 has an annual contract worth £190,000 to provide short term help to families in crisis. The organisation also runs the appropriate adult service which helps ensure youngsters taken into custody receive their legal and welfare rights.

As this is a statutory service, there will be no cuts to the £30,000 budget for the service.

Action for Children (ACE) has a contract worth £671,000 and works with 100 families to develop coping strategies and improve parental relationships with the aim of keeping children from being taken into the care of the local authority. It also provides emotional wellbeing support for children in these families.

A multi systemic therapy service is currently contracted out to Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust at an annual cost of £750,000 and works with 80 families of adolescent offenders.

The report says that professionals, service providers and families are currently being surveyed about their views on the services and the proposed budget cuts.

Northamptonshire children’s services have been in turmoil for many years and have seen two child murders since 2017. In his latest report to Government children’s commissioner Andrew Christie says the department is improving.However making cuts to the early help budget could be risky.

In its report last July when it placed the department into special measures, Ofsted said the authority needed to improve its ‘strategic development of early help services to ensure that children’s needs are identified and responded to at the earliest opportunity.’

It also said early help services within Northamptonshire had not been sufficiently developed and the pace of change was too slow leading to children’s needs not being responded to early enough.

A message from the Editor:

Thank you for reading this story on our website. While I have your attention, I also have an important request to make of you.

In order for us to continue to provide high quality and trusted local news on this free-to-read site, I am asking you to also please purchase a copy of our newspaper when you do your weekly shop.

Our journalists are highly trained and our content is independently regulated by IPSO to some of the most rigorous standards in the world. But being your eyes and ears comes at a price. So we need your support more than ever to buy our newspapers during this crisis.

With the coronavirus lockdown having a major impact on many of our local valued advertisers - and consequently the advertising that we receive - we are more reliant than ever on you helping us to provide you with news and information by buying a copy of our newspaper.

Thank you

David Summers