Josh MacAlister’s landmark review published in May advocated for and provided the case for a whole system reset of children’s social care.
The independent review says the reset is needed so that the system is balanced much more towards early and intensive support, by getting help to families and parents so they can raise their children successfully.
It states that building out from that involves supporting kinship carers to play a much bigger role. And when the care system is needed, it has to provide homes close to where children live so they don’t need to be far away when they’re in care. It also needs to provide lasting, stable and loving relationships, whether in a foster home or a children’s home.
The review’s final report talked about a programme for change that built on ‘hundreds of conversations and ideas people have shared with us, so that the Government can grab the baton and move forward at pace’.
Next month MacAlister moves on to a new role as executive chair of the new organisation formed by merging the Early Intervention Foundation and What Works for Children’s Social Care. Speaking to The MJ ahead of this week’s National Children and Adult Services Conference in Manchester, he says the case he put forward hasn’t changed. And while a day is a very long time in politics right now, he is still confident the Government will stick to its plan to respond by the end of the year.
The review, he says, ‘sets out a reform programme with a price tag attached’. To achieve this vision, it calls for a temporary injection of roughly £2bn over the next five years, targeting about half a million children who require extra support.
Why is he still so convinced the Government remains determined to act on his proposals? It’s worth noting that within days of talking to The MJ, the dizzying ministerial merry-go-round delivered a new education secretary in Gillian Keegan, with Claire Coutinho likely, at the time of writing, to replace Kelly Tolhurst, who was schools and children’s minister.
Between the start of the review and the day of the interview with The MJ there had already been four secretaries of state and four different children’s ministers, and that instability at the top ‘would make any organisation dysfunctional’. But he can see that the officials are ‘working in a focused way and really hard, to make sure that ministers have the option available to them of publishing by the end of this year’.
Has anything in the political environment changed since publication? ‘The case is the same. The need for it is more acute because of pressure on public spending.
‘Getting best value from public spending means that we need to take the opportunity where there is a plan to both improve services and reduce the long term costs to make them more sustainable.’
He restates the review’s message that over the next 10 years the costs of children’s social care annually will rise from £10bn to about £15bn, and, of course, ‘that was before inflation’.
MacAlister emphasises that If the Government fails to set out a plan that delivers the sort of reset the review says is needed, the costs will go up. He adds: ‘What’s striking is that no one really disputes that. So it’s recognised.
‘And really the test here is whether people are up for longer-term solutions and prepared to grasp the issue. The risky and imprudent decision on this is to just do nothing and to carry on as we are.’
What would his key message be to the Government? He says that if chancellor Jeremy Hunt is worried about what he has described as eye-wateringly difficult public sector spending choices, then he would tell him to back this reform programme. ‘The review sets out cashable savings within the children’s social care system. We did the costings using Treasury rules so that the analysis would be accepted by them.
‘When you take a further step back and actually look at the societal costs of getting this wrong – the long term life impact on children and their parents of failing to provide the support at the right time – those costs are eye-watering.’
He says that just on the most narrow financial grounds, his report’s reforms make a lot of sense. ‘When you look at the wider picture the argument is really compelling. That’s only if we’re talking about money. Of course, there is more to this than the money.’
The review sets out a four year investment programme as part of a five year reform package. But he says that the Government may decide that this should be implemented over ‘six years, 10 years, whatever – the point is, we need to get going on this’.
He concludes: ‘The direction is provided, and the plan needs to be started. It’s perfectly legitimate for the Government to say they’re going to pursue the plan in their own way. But I didn’t want them to say they hadn’t been given the answers.’
