Response to neglect ‘slow and inadequate’ due to high thresholds and lack of services, finds NSPCC

Councils’ response to child neglect is “slow and inadequate” due to high thresholds for intervention and a lack of services, the NSPCC has found.

A third of social workers polled by the charity said they had faced pressure from managers or colleagues to cease or delay intervention in neglect cases, while professionals in partner agencies criticised how children’s social care responded to the issue.

Neglect is defined by the government as “the persistent failure to meet a child’s basic physical and/or psychological needs, [which is] likely to result in the serious impairment of the child’s health or development” (source: Working Together to Safeguard Children).

Call for national strategy to tackle ‘normalisation’ of neglect

In a report published last week, the NSPCC warned that a ‘normalisation’ of neglect, amid high rates of poverty and long-term cuts to preventive services, was resulting in children being left for too long in harmful situations.

However, it said that neither the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care (the “care review”), which reported in 2022, and the previous government’s response to it, the Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy, addressed the issue adequately.

The charity, which polled 100 social workers and 600 teachers, police officers and healthcare professionals for its report, urged the government to develop a national neglect strategy and improved guidance for practitioners on tackling the issue, tied to ministers’ plans to tackle child poverty.

Most common category of abuse

Neglect is the most common initial category of abuse recorded in child protection plans in England, accounting for just under half (49.3%) of cases as of March 2023.

Recorded levels of neglect have remained consistent since 2019, as have the numbers of emotional abuse cases, during which time levels of recorded physical abuse, sexual abuse and multiple abuse have fallen.

The NSPCC found that 82% of social workers – and 54% of all professionals surveyed – had seen an increase in the level of neglect during their professional lifetimes. Of those who had seen an increase, 90% said this had been driven by increases in the cost of living and poverty, with 76% citing cuts in community support to parents.

The latter reflects the 44% fall in council spending on early intervention services from 2010-11 to 2022-23 identified in analysis for the NSPCC and fellow children’s charities (source: Larkham, J, 2024).

However, practitioners who took part in online focus groups for the NSPCC’s study, told the charity that neglect often did not meet the threshold for intervention.

Social workers ‘encouraged to delay action’ on neglect 

A third of social workers surveyed said they had been encouraged by a colleague or a manager to delay or cease action on a neglect, compared with 21% who had experienced this in relation to other forms of maltreatment.

Reflecting this, 52% of teachers polled said children’s social care usually responded slowly to neglect cases.

The NSPCC linked this to the child protection system being “heavily skewed” to identifying individual incidents that meet the threshold of a child suffering, or being likely to suffer, significant harm.

“Unlike other forms of abuse, neglect rarely manifests as a crisis requiring immediate action,” the report said. “This makes it challenging to identify as practitioners must consider the severity, frequency, developmental timing and duration of neglectful behaviour, to address whether it reaches the threshold for intervention.”

Lack of services to tackle neglect

Even where neglect was identified, practitioners reported that there was a lack of services to support families.

Only 19% of police officers said they thought appropriate action was taken to give the child and family the necessary support to address neglect and 21% said this support was never given. More broadly, 83% of all professionals surveyed said there were not enough services in their areas to provide targeted support to children and families in these cases.

Education and health professionals pointed to a lack of resource and expertise to address neglect in early help services, with teachers in particular highlighting the challenge of families accessing services based on parental consent.

Meanwhile, social workers also highlighted the lack of specialist interventions for children affected by neglect, contrary to practice in relation to child exploitation.

Social care reform strategy ‘does not address neglect’

The NSPCC said the previous government had not adequately addressed neglect through its Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy.

That document made just four references to neglect – all in the context of child maltreatment more generally – though it dealt with specific forms of abuse and exploitation similarly.

It said that the strategy’s flagship reform – to create multi-disciplinary family help teams, merged from targeted early help and child in need services, to improve the timeliness and effectiveness of family support – could “transform the response to neglect”.

The charity said that the new Labour government should make sure that pathfinder local authorities develop an early response to neglect as part of their testing of the family help reform.

This should focus on engaging with and nurturing families where neglect is present in order to encourage them to engage and accept help.

Call for neglect strategy

More broadly, the NSPCC called on the government to develop a national neglect strategy, in order to share the latest best practice, learning and evidence about neglect, its links to poverty, its impact over time and what works in tackling it, both through universal and specialist services, and to improve training for relevant practitioners.

Alongside this, the government should examine the case for amending the definition of neglect in Working Together to Safeguard Children (see above), including potentially removing the reference to the harm being “persistent”.

“No child should be left to experience maltreatment until it is deemed to be ‘persistent’ enough for intervention,” the charity said. “The opportunity to intervene early is then missed, with devastating consequences for the child, and a need for more costly late-stage
intervention.”

The NSPCC pointed out that definitions of neglect in Wales and Northern Ireland did not reference persistence. It added in Scotland, the definition, while referencing persistence stresses that single instances of neglect can cause significant harm.