The shock withdrawal from Wales of the Children's Society has led Jane Hutt, the Welsh minister responsible for children's services, to call for a task force bringing together all relevant interest groups in Wales.
What a good idea. What a shame such a body couldn't have considered the Children's Society's move beforehand, in the context of services across the principality.
Meanwhile, the NSPCC faces allegations, from its own staff, that cuts made by the charity will leave gaps in service provision in parts of England. The NSPCC is merely exercising its right to make decisions autonomously, on the basis of its own priorities and funding position. But even private firms, if they provide essential services, are subject to the overview of a third party - regulators would not allow areas to be left without water, for example.
Services for the most vulnerable and damaged children are in turmoil across both statutory and voluntary sectors. The statutory sector is starved of funds, and as social services departments confine themselves to statutory work, other equally vital services have increasingly been left to charities.
Now many charities find donations are falling and campaigns - such as the NSPCC's Full Stop campaign -Êare raising less money than forecast. And when charities in turn withdraw from vital services, there is nobody to pick up the pieces.
There should be a strategic overview of the provision of children's services in all parts of the UK. Any agency - whether statutory or voluntary - should be called to account if it plans to abandon services which have been identified as necessary.
Only last week, Treasury minister Paul Boateng told charity chief executives that the government would never threaten their independence. But that independence has its price, and vulnerable children are paying.
Ultimately, the government must be called to account for the inadequate funding of children's services across the board. The independence and autonomy of charities, which currently cannot be challenged even in extreme cases, is a smokescreen behind which those who should be responsible for the bigger picture are hiding.
See news, pages 6 and 12
The right kind of merger
The government has said that it is determined to end the annual bun-fight in which social services and health blame each other for the inevitable winter "bed-blocking" crises. It has put up an extra £300m to cure the ills of bed-blocking by 2004, an ambitious target even by this government's standards. The money may go some way towards producing a more co-operative spirit between those social services departments and health trusts which have been at loggerheads over how and when to discharge older people from hospital, but it is unlikely to go the whole way.
So the British Medical Assocation's call for a merger between the National Care Standards Commission, which will monitor standards across social care from next April, and the Commission for Health Improvement, responsible for health service inspections, deserves serious consideration.
The NCSC will be responsible for inspecting a range of nursing home and intermediate care facilities in the independent and statutory sectors. The CHI will also be able to inspect health service delivery in these facilities. It makes sense to combine inspections in one organisation, and not just for administrative reasons. Integrated inspections across health and social care boundaries could help to integrate services. That is a goal well worth achieving.
See news, page 6
