This week, the Chancellor, John Healey, delivered his first Budget, 100 days after Andy Burnham took office. This was not designed to change immediate policy priorities or overhaul existing reform programmes. Instead, it sought to provide households with ‘breathing room’ to weather rising living costs, while giving the government the breathing space needed to advance its wider reform agenda.
Given the scale of the reforms already underway, it is striking that a major fiscal milestone could pass with only limited indication of how these initiatives connect to a broader vision for children, families and communities.
While the Budget may provide some short-term relief for households, the wider question is how funding, delivery and reform will be brought together into a coherent plan for change. For many families, these short-term measures will do little to address the longer-term challenges they face, particularly the impact of poverty on their lives.
As the government moves towards the Spending Review and the decisions that will shape future spending, reform and devolution, there is an opportunity to set out a clearer vision for how these initiatives will work together to improve outcomes across the life course.
At the National Children's Bureau (NCB), we work with partners across the country who are putting these reforms into practice. Local authorities are managing multiple reform programmes simultaneously, spanning Best Start in Life, Early Help, Families First and children's social care reform, SEND, and adult services. All of these reforms are hugely important. But transformation will not come from pursuing them in parallel. It will come from bringing them together, underpinned by a shared vision and connected through aligned funding, delivery and accountability.
Families need more than short-term relief
The Budget's focus was on easing immediate pressures. Yet it included few fiscal announcements that took account of children, and there was little to indicate how the government intends to address the deep-rooted challenges facing children and families. Above all, child poverty.
Temporary financial relief may help families get to the end of the month, but it does not change the circumstances that keep them in financial hardship. Child poverty cannot be reduced through a series of small interventions. It requires an ambitious strategy that tackles the causes of deprivation and is backed by sustained investment.
Addressing inequality and poverty has long been central to NCB's work. Through our programmes, research and partnerships, we have highlighted the lasting impact of poverty on children's health, wellbeing, education and future opportunities across the life course. We have also highlighted the need for action that reflects how these effects accumulate and interact over time. Building on this work, we have recently launched a new youth-led programme funded to shape and inform government strategies and policies to end child poverty.
A missing link between reform and delivery
Across government, multiple reviews, reforms and strategies are underway to improve outcomes for children, young people, adults, families and communities in different ways and at different stages of life.
Local authorities, the NHS and their partners are already delivering several of these at once. However, it has not been demonstrated how these initiatives will be brought together into a coherent, overarching vision.
From our work with organisations across sectors, we know that reforms like the Child Poverty Strategy succeed only when funding and policy are designed to bring local services together around the communities they serve.
At NCB, our work spans early years, education, health and wellbeing, social care, poverty and community support. This gives us a unique perspective on how policies affecting children, young people, adults, families and communities interact in practice, and why policy, funding and delivery must work together if reform is to succeed.
We’ve argued that reforms should take a life course approach, recognising the critical stages, transitions and settings that shape people's lives and where support is needed over time. Support must be designed around people's lives rather than institutional boundaries.
Families do not experience their lives through arbitrary age boundaries, separate government departments or policy programmes. They need services and professionals in their lives to be working together, pulling in the same direction.
Effective policy and spending decisions must reflect that and treat the factors affecting childhood and adulthood as a connected whole, rather than a series of separate pots of money with separate processes and different objectives.
From short-term relief to long-term change
While the Budget did not set out the long-term solutions needed to address deep-rooted challenges, it pointed towards shifts in approach that could help lay the foundations for lasting change. If developed in the right way, these could help create the conditions for more joined-up and preventative support for children, families and communities.
Three potentially significant shifts stand out:
- a commitment to a fiscal devolution roadmap
- a pledge to ringfence preventative spending at the next Comprehensive Spending Review
- a greater focus on shaping services around communities rather than central programmes.
We have long supported the principle of prevention, but our work with the Children’s Services Funding Alliance shows that spending on early support has fallen significantly over the past 15 years. The rising costs of late intervention have squeezed out the support available to families before problems escalate, leaving Children’s Services increasingly focused on responding to crisis. While the Chancellor has framed prevention as a way to bring down future spending, the greatest cost of reaching crisis point is a human one, borne by children and families who could have been supported sooner.
A new approach to devolution also has the potential to give local leaders greater freedom to invest early and shape support around the communities they serve, rather than around separate Whitehall programmes. However, as resources, responsibilities and accountability are devolved, careful consideration must be given to what this means for babies, children and young people.
Devolution alone is not a guarantee of better outcomes. Decisions about local powers, funding and accountability should be judged by whether they help reduce poverty and improve outcomes during childhood and at every stage of life.
The months ahead
The coming months are critical. The details of the new cross-departmental spending limits will be set at the Spending Review, and the devolution roadmap is being developed.
These decisions must be underpinned by a clear and coherent vision for children and families. The government's reviews, reforms and strategies should not be treated as separate initiatives, but as different parts of the same core mission: building, supporting and sustaining the foundations of a good life at every stage and in every community.
As those plans develop, the Spending Review will be a critical test of whether the government's ambitions are matched by a funding model that supports joined-up delivery. Without that joined-up approach, even the most ambitious reforms risk delivering less than they promise, leaving the long-term challenges facing children, families and communities unresolved.