CWDC budget slashed by £15m

The Children’s Workforce Development Council’s budget will be slashed by £15m over the next financial year.

The figure amounts to around 10% of the CWDC’s overall budget of £149m for 2010-11.

The skills council, which supports the development of children’s social work in England, has been told to find the efficiency savings as part of the Treasury’s plan to save £6.2bn from the public purse in 2010-11.

A statement from the CWDC said: “We are working closely with Department for Education (DfE) officials to determine how these £15 million of cuts will affect us and how we can continue to achieve the very best for children and young people.”

The £15m budget cut is among a total of £600m in cuts to quangos within the Treasury’s savings plan. Overall, £80m from cuts to quangos within the re-named Department for Education, which replaces the Department for Children, Schools and Families.

However, a Department for Education spokesperson said that national newspaper hints that the Children’s Commissioner was at risk in this first round of cuts were not true.

He added that £16m of savings will come from the National College of Leadership in Schools and Children’s Services, which is overseeing a leadership development programme for directors of children’s services.

“This will mostly come from not following up on some of the pilot programmes they are running that are not currently good value for money,” the spokesperson said.

An additional £11m of savings would come from within the Department for Education itself, by cutting back office staff around IT procurement and research programmes, while £3m would be cut from conferences and networking events.

“By far the bulk of the cuts, £311m or 3.3%, will come from the local authority grants. That’s our share of the savings from this area that has to be made across all departments. We haven’t broken down where those cuts will be made but the Department for Local Government and Communities will be setting out more detail in the next few weeks,” the Department for Education spokesperson said.

Councils in England will have to make savings of £1.165bn but in return ring fencing will be removed from £1.7bn of local government grants.
 
The cuts programme is designed to tackle “the unprecedented £156 billion deficit, while protecting the quality of key frontline services”, according to Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne.

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