Early intervention services play an important role in delivering positive outcomes for babies, children, young people and their families. Mainly funded and provided by councils in England, they cover a range of age and needs-based interventions, support and services.
Early years services focus on supporting the healthy development of babies and young children alongside relevant parental support. Increasingly, these services are being integrated into Family Hubs alongside a wider range of family support and youth services. These include public health initiatives, housing, debt and welfare advice, support for children with special educational needs and/or disability, and their families, and other more intensive aspects of family support and outreach, such as domestic abuse or parental substance misuse interventions.
For older children and teenagers, universal services for young people tend to involve the provision of educational or leisure-based recreational activities, such as youth clubs and holiday activity programmes. More targeted youth services focus on addressing emerging needs such as school exclusion, substance misuse, teenage pregnancy, or reducing the risk of youth offending or criminal exploitation.
Despite the clear importance of these services, our analysis shows that related spending has fallen by more than £2 billion in real terms since 2010/11, a decrease of 42%. Crucially, we find that these reductions have been highly uneven in their distribution. Spending per child has fallen by more than half (53%) in the most-deprived local authority areas, amounting to a reduction of more than half a billion pounds. Conversely, the least-deprived areas have reduced spending by less than one third (30%), equivalent to less than £200 million.
Changes to spending have also been unequal in other important ways. Expenditure on family support services has grown by 43%, while spending on young people’s services and children’s centres has each fallen by more than 70%, leading to the loss of hundreds of youth and children’s centres. The impact on service providers has also been unevenly distributed, with the voluntary sector particularly affected. Expenditure on voluntary sector provision has fallen by more than £200 million, a reduction of almost two-thirds (65%).
Dwindling early intervention budgets, resulting from reductions in local government funding coupled with escalating demand and cost pressures, have coincided with worsening outcomes for children and young people. The number of children in care has increased by around 40% in two decades, levels of child poverty and homelessness have risen, and the mental health and happiness of children and young people has deteriorated significantly.
Increased funding for local government in recent years, coupled with plans for broader funding reforms and promises to tackle wider policy issues, such as child poverty, offer a glimmer of hope. Additionally, a renewed commitment to recalibrating children’s services towards a more preventative approach has been matched with modest growth in spending on early intervention services in the 2020s. Taken together, this combination of policy interventions and increased investment indicate a positive change of direction from central and local government.
However, the road to recovery is likely to be long, and several challenges put this emerging recovery at risk. The current scale of spending commitments for early intervention are unlikely to be sufficient to deliver on the ambition to rebalance the system away from high-cost, late interventions. Alongside this, councils face several practical challenges to service reform. Clearly, the areas hardest hit by historic cuts are likely to lag behind their better-placed counterparts, while some local authorities we consulted were concerned about ways to manage the integration of targeted early help services with child protection work in a way that ensured an appropriate balance between the two.
Meanwhile, demand and cost pressures on local government are likely to continue to escalate. Government plans to intervene in the children’s residential care market may bring some of this under control in the medium term, but it is unlikely that it will alleviate financial pressures on local councils in the short term. This means that any investment in early intervention is likely to run in parallel with continued increased spending on late intervention services. With the latest forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) implying that any public spending increases in the next few years are likely to be small, the future of further investment in local government and early intervention services is uncertain.
While some of this uncertainty may be mitigated by plans to provide councils with multi-year funding settlements, it remains difficult to see how spending on early intervention services will get anywhere near historic levels. Moreover, without more robust protection, the budgets of early intervention services are likely to be highly vulnerable should councils be forced into further spending reductions.
This scenario risks sending us back down a path that has left so many babies, children, young people and their families fighting a losing battle against some of life’s biggest challenges without timely care and support.