No new funding for children’s social care reforms in Tory manifesto despite £2.6bn care review bill

The Conservatives have allocated no new funding to reforming children’s social care in their election manifesto, despite the blueprint for the changes carrying a £2.6bn bill.

The manifesto, issued yesterday, made two specific pledges on children’s social care, to create more places in children’s homes and to expand befriending and mentoring programmes for care leavers.

The document also made more generalised commitments to prioritise keeping children with their families where that was best for them, including through its kinship care strategy, support adoption, where that was the better option, and help care leavers with housing, education and employment.

However, there was no funding attached to these proposals, or children’s social care generally, in the accompanying costings document, nor was there any specific commitment to roll out the government’s current sector reforms.

The proposed changes, set out in last year’s Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy, are designed to ensure that many more children are supported to stay with their families or, where this is not possible, with kinship carers; that those at risk are much better protected than is currently the case, and that those who do need to go into care receive a much better experience and, as a result, better life chances than now.

£2.6bn cost for care review reforms

The Department for Education (DfE) has invested £200m from 2023-25 in testing the planned changes, for example, through the 10 families first for children pathfinder areas. They are trialling setting up multi-disciplinary family help teams, through the merger of targeted early help and child in need services, to provide more effective and non-stigmatising support to families, as well as testing specialist child protection teams.

However, the blueprint for the reforms – the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care’s final report, published in 2022 – costed the rollout of the changes at £2.6bn over four years, the vast majority of which would be spent on family help (£2bn).

This would generate savings by year five of the reform programme, through a reduction in the number of children in care, but this would only happen as a result of the up-front investment, according to care review lead Josh MacAlister.

Children’s home funding already committed

The pledge to create more children’s home places in the manifesto is likely to be a reference to the £165m announced by chancellor Jeremy Hunt in his spring budget this year to develop open and secure homes over the next four years.

In relation to the plan to expand befriending and mentoring schemes for care leavers, it is not clear whether this goes beyond the DfE’s existing plan to spend £18.4m on these and family finding programmes in 2024-25, up from £11.7m last year.

The funding is designed to help looked-after children and care leavers identify and connect with important people in their lives, improve their sense of identity and community and create and sustain consistent, stable and loving relationships.

‘Limited progress on care review recommendations’ – charities

The Conservatives had pledged to review the care system in their 2019 manifesto and went on to commission MacAlister, who is a Labour candidate in the election, to carry out a broader review of children’s social care.

In a comment on the party’s latest manifesto, the Children’s Charities Coalition, which includes Action for Children, Barnardo’s, the Children’s Society, the NCB and the NSPCC, said: “They delivered on this but there’s been limited progress on its recommendations and it sadly will not create the long-lasting change that is so desperately needed.”

For the charity Kinship, head of policy and public affairs Sam Turner said: “While we are pleased to see the Conservative party manifesto commit to prioritising kinship care where best for the child, we’re disappointed that no further ambitions are set out which go beyond the existing commitments made in the national kinship care strategy.”

The strategy includes plans to pilot giving some kinship carers equivalent allowances to foster carers and expand the role of virtual headteachers to cover support for children of kinship carers in education, as well as those who are looked after.

However, the DfE was criticised, including by Kinship, for not providing financial support for kinship carers more generally and not giving them a statutory right to paid leave, as is the case with adoptive parents.

Lack of funding ‘at odds with crisis facing councils’

In relation to the Conservative manifesto, Turner added: “The lack of any detail on additional spending for children’s social care within the manifesto costings document sits at odds with the significant funding crisis facing local authority children’s services. Investing in well-supported kinship care is part of the solution.”

He called on the next UK government to deliver on the proposals in Kinship’s own manifesto for the election, to provide carers with equivalent levels of support to foster carers in relation to allowances, training and therapeutic support for children, and to adoptive parents in relation to paid leave.

Fellow charity Become, which supports looked-after children and young care leavers, also gave the mainfesto a mixed response.

“We welcome the Conservative Party manifesto pledges to provide more places in children’s homes, as well as to increase support for care leavers – issues we raise in our own manifesto,” said CEO Katharine Sacks-Jones.

“However broader reform and meaningful investment is needed to address the huge challenges facing children’s social care.”

“The next government must act urgently to increase the supply of suitable residential and foster homes across the country, ensuring children can stay close to the people and places that matter to them, and to end the care cliff, the expectation for young people to leave care at 18 and become independent overnight,” she added.

The Conservative Party has been approached for comment.