While his school friends play outside at lunchtime, Lenny Griffin sits alone in a classroom, colouring in. The five-year-old, who has a degenerative condition and uses a wheelchair, is helped by a teaching assistant for three hours a day but the exertion of getting food on his own leaves him exhausted.
“The council constantly tells me Lenny doesn’t need any extra support, but it’s clear that he does,” said his mother, Kirsty, a primary school teacher in East Riding, Yorkshire. “None of this is his fault.”
Kirsty is at the sharp end of a council funding crisis that is leaving thousands of parents fighting for support as local authorities battle to balance falling budgets and rocketing demand for children’s services.
Across England increasing numbers of local authorities, which provide vital services to communities including support for vulnerable people, are warning of financial collapse following a decade of national budget restraint.
Earlier this month, the local government sector warned of a £4bn overall funding gap over the next two years, including acute and growing pressures in children’s services, which an incoming government will have to grapple with following the general election expected next year.
Councils point to a 23 per cent rise this year in demand for school transport for children with special educational needs and disabilities (Send), a “broken” care market and a rise in the number of vulnerable children in care since 2009.
A council spokesperson said East Riding had the lowest funding for Send support nationally but that all areas were wrestling with “huge growth in demand” for children’s services “with limited resources”.
Despite some cautious optimism among councils that the chancellor Jeremy Hunt might have provided further funding for children’s services in his Autumn Statement earlier this month, none was forthcoming.
The absence of new money alongside an unfunded increase in the national minimum wage has left authorities financially in an “even worse position than they were before”, said Cllr Barry Lewis, Conservative leader of Derbyshire county council and finance spokesman for the County Councils Network.
The House of Commons levelling up committee is currently holding an inquiry on councils in “financial distress”, including the growing numbers declaring themselves in effect bankrupt. In a letter to levelling up secretary Michael Gove this week, its chair Clive Betts pinpointed soaring children’s services costs as a key factor.
A sharp rise in demand for Send support, intended to help youngsters like Lenny, has been one of the main causes of financial pressure on local areas.
In 2014 the government passed the Children and Families Act, which expanded the type of help available to children and widened its availability beyond the age of 16 to 25. Since then applications for Emotional, Health and Care Plans, documents prepared by councils and intended to outline what support a child would receive, have doubled.
Stephen Kingdom, campaign manager at the Disabled Children’s Partnership of charities, said better treatment and diagnosis had resulted in a growing awareness among parents.
The problem was not with the legislation but a “lack of money” to go with it, he said, adding that central government had neglected to make the policy a priority.
“It’s not a vote winner and it feels like nobody understands what children’s social care — and particularly social care for disabled children — is,” he noted.
A government spokesperson said councils had received a 9.4 per cent cash terms funding increase this year but added: “We stand ready to talk to any council that is concerned about its financial position.”
The government was investing £259mn in creating more care placements, the spokesperson added, and had increased investment in children with “high needs” by 60 per cent since 2019.
In response to soaring costs, the Department for Education has allowed councils to overspend on their schools budgets because of demand for Send support, a policy recently extended until March 2026.
Lorna Baxter, president of the Association of Local Authorities’ Treasurer Societies and chief financial officer at Oxfordshire County Council, told the select committee that by then the overspend would hit £3.6bn.
Against these rising pressures, there has also been an increase in both demand for and the cost of specialist placements for children with complex needs.
Cllr Graham Chapman, Labour leader of Nottingham city council, which this week became the latest authority to declare itself in effect bankrupt, told the select committee that the market used by councils was “broken”, with individual placements now costing up to £1mn a year.
“The costs are rising inexorably,” he said. “Children are very often being processed rather than looked after.”
The Competition and Markets Authority, the competition regulator, also warned last year that the children’s social care market was “dysfunctional”.
The Local Government Association said ministers needed to roll out planned programmes for foster care recruitment, expand children’s homes and increase the number of inpatient mental health beds in the NHS, which it said had fallen by 20 per cent for teenagers between 2017 and 2022.
Meanwhile, official figures published earlier this month show the number of children in local authority care due to being at risk of harm is now the highest on record, at 83,840.
Middlesbrough ranks joint top for child poverty in the UK government’s Index of Multiple Deprivation. The council spends 84 per cent of its core budget on social care, the third highest proportion nationally.
Labour mayor Chris Cooke said that since 2010, the link between an area’s needs and its funding had been severed.
“The lack of any kind of needs-based funding is one of the biggest factors,” he said of the council’s financial pressures, adding that the area does not have a high enough local tax base to fill the gap.
David Phillips, head of devolved and local government finance at the Institute for Fiscal Studies think-tank, told the levelling up committee that “the system of allocating funding between councils is untethered from any assessment of their overall relative needs or ability to raise revenues themselves”.
Simon Hoare, local government minister, told the committee in November that “there is no work at hand” to change the funding formula.
While councils lobby government, a growing number of parents in search of Send support are turning to specialist tribunal courts.
Research by the consultancy Pro Bono Economics found 96 per cent of those legal challenges were successful last year, dubbing the money spent by councils fighting these disputes a “waste” of taxpayer resources.
Kirsty, whose son has a rare form of muscular dystrophy called Duchenne, has registered a tribunal against East Riding council.
“I would much rather he didn’t have Duchenne and that he didn’t have to go through any of this,” she said. “But he has the same rights to an education as any other child in this country. It’s essential he gets that.”
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