The week in public services — 15 January 2019
This week: stuff that isn’t Brexit! NHS long-term plan reactions, Damian Hinds wants to take a load off teachers and councils continuing to overspend on children’s social care.
Health and social care
The NHS long-term plan has not yet been lost in the wash with all the Parliamentary Brexit news. My comment on The Plan went up last week, and others in the health space have been weighing in.
The King’s Fund, Health Foundation and Nuffield Trust all cited the workforce shortages as crucial to The Plan’s success, besides other areas beyond the NHS’s remit (social care, public health, the B-word).
Don Redding of National Voices assessed the plan against his acronymous test: some powerful positives, but some missed opportunities (notably on community engagement around integration, addressing multimorbidity and specifying the role of the voluntary sector).
Adam Lent, Director of the New Local Government Network, suggests that the NHS should look to the example set by some local authorities in reconstituting their relationship with the communities they serve to create a more collaborative approach to local services. Reform’s Director Andrew Haldenby thinks it’s the MoD that the NHS should learn from, and publish quarterly updates of key targets related to The Plan to help it succeed where its predecessors have fallen short. Professor Kath Checkland and Dr Jon Hammond suggest its goal are too vague to even merit being called a plan. One thing we can all agree on is that the Long-Term Plan absolutely requires a hyphen.
Away from The Plan, some people are talking about social care. This detailed blog from Chris Hatton shows that while councils are trying to protect social care funding for adults with learning disabilities, they’re still unable to keep up with need.
The latest hospital stats show a welcome improvement on last year (great thread here from WiPS guru Graham), but key targets are still being missed, and it’s still relatively warm.
Children and Young People
Damian Hinds celebrated his anniversary as Education Secretary by setting out his plan to tackle teachers’ workload, which he says will be a key point of focus for the forthcoming recruitment and retention strategy.
The Education Policy Institute published its new report on school revenue balances in England: the headline is that almost a third of local authority maintained secondary schools were in deficit last year (some of them very large deficits), almost four times as many in 2014.
Labour have claimed teacher bursaries are wasteful, after DfE figures showed that the percentage of bursary-holders employed as teachers was lower than the equivalent figure for teachers who had qualified through other routes. The Government, however, claims that bursary holders are higher-quality teachers. The evidence isn’t clear, but in any case bursaries only target recruitment — not worsening retention rates.
Dave Thomson wrote an interesting blog last week about ‘stuck’ schools (schools that cannot reach the ‘good’ threshold in Ofsted inspections) and how long it takes for them to become unstuck.
Last week DfE announced a £45m funding boost to the Frontline programme, which it claims will train 900 new children’s social workers. The question is whether it can retain them once they’re qualified.
While this isn’t strictly news — local authorities have overspent their children’s social care budgets every year since 2010/11; it is important. New analysis from The Guardian and the Local Government Association has found that 88% of councils overspent their children’s social care budgets last year, as the number of children being taken into care rapidly increased.
Taking this one step further, and comparing the latest spending numbers to local authorities’ original budget plans shows that largest overspends were in spending on looked after children, safeguarding, and family support. Last year’s spending on looked after children was almost 20% more than councils had originally budgeted (£4.5bn vs £3.8bn). As this spending is generally used to deliver legal obligations, this suggests that rising demand — and inability to make further efficiencies — in statutory services are driving councils into the red.
Here’s an excellent blog from Martin Lennon at the Children’s Commissioner exploring how the children-in-need review shrank down to consider just educational outcomes, and why we need to care about children-in-need who aren’t reaching the thresholds for child protection or care.
The Government’s ambition to improve children’s mental health services lack a comprehensive plan, and the data required to monitor progress. Failure to increase the number of mental health nurses is a particular barrier, say the Public Accounts Committee.
Outside the services we cover in Performance Tracker, but still important. In early years, the increase in the number of children with special educational needs and disabilities is putting pressure on nurseries, as the Government’s childcare commitment is not funded to cover all the hours these children spend in nurseries.
Neighbourhood Services and Local Government
This week the NAO released a new report on local authority governance, in which it concludes that MHCLG needs to improve its oversight of the sector, be more transparent about its engagement with local authorities and provide stronger leadership.
Middlesbrough Council is considering further job cuts to claw itself out of deficit. Public services for which it has no statutory obligation, like pest control services and street wardens, would likely bear the brunt of any reduction in posts. A cessation of building projects will also take place to save cash.
Councils are reaching a fly-tipping point. The Furniture Recycling Group reports that clearing up fly-tips cost councils £57m in 2016/17, and has called on the Government to support local authorities in scrapping bulk waste collection fees.
Law and order
The big news this week was prison minister Rory Stewart’s support for abolishing prison sentences shorter than six months and extending the use of community sentencing. Russell Webster had a good write up of the case for getting rid of short sentences, and it is one of the few plausible ways of reducing demand on prisons.
HMICFRS has published a report on public perceptions of the police. It reports 61% of people are satisfied with local police, which aligns with Performance Tracker’s findings that 62% of people rated the police as good or excellent in 2017/18 (we use the Crime Survey in England and Wales from the ONS to determine satisfaction).
The Government has promised a review of criminal legal aid fee schemes to start this month and report by the summer of 2020.
Finally, Devon and Cornwall Police will start using controversial spit guards to protect their officers and staff: in 2016 there were 216 assaults on officers and staff, 18% of which involved saliva. The Performance Tracker police chapter has more details on the national statistics on assaults on police officers.
