The week in public services: 27th August 2019
This week: the results of Rory Stewart’s prisons experiment; increases in local government reserves; and private equity in foster care
General
Bloomberg are reporting rumours that Sajid Javid might delay the budget until 2020. Help me out, public finance nerds: does this matter given that the Government has confirmed we’ll definitely have a one-year spending review in September? Is there anything a Government can do in a budget that it can’t do in a Spending Review? Other than not having the latest economic and fiscal forecasts from the OBR…any answers genuinely appreciated!
This IFS observation about the September Spending Review, from Ben Zaranko, still looks like the most comprehensive guide to me.
Health and Social Care
Following on from last week, nurses and doctors are concerned about the impact of any immediate revocation of freedom of movement — not to mention the uncertainty that Patel’s announcement has created for hospitals trying to recruit nurses.
Children and Young People
Fantastic bit of data viz from the Education Policy Institute on the A level gender gap in attainment and entries between 1996 and 2018.
Great blogs from Education DataLab on the ‘London effect’ — that disadvantaged pupils in London outperform disadvantaged pupils in the rest of the country. They analyse why, finding that with the latest data, it still seems to be the case that it’s still partly — but not entirely — driven by differences in ethnicity. While disadvantaged white British students perform no better in London than elsewhere, disadvantaged Asian British students seem to make more progress. Overall? “We have yet to really crack whether the schools improved the pupils or the pupils improved the schools.”
If you can’t get enough school statistics, they’ve also analysed how grades have changed in each subject between this year and last, and what might explain that. And even more from the Education Policy Institute — overall there was a slight increase in GCSE attainment: 20.6% of entries received a grade 7 (read: equivalent to an A), an 0.2 percentage point increase on last year.
New research from the Children’s Commissioner tries to estimate the number of vulnerable children living in temporary accommodation and/or who are ‘sofa-surfing’ and therefore not captured in the official statistics. Patrick Butler has written about what living in that temporary accommodation is really like.
Meanwhile, the Local Government Association have raised concerns about private equity firms ‘intruding’ into the foster care market, worrying that having a few large financiers own most foster care agencies risks leaving councils with no other options if one collapses.
In more positive news, encouraging signs from an experiment in devolving care budgets to social workers.
Law and Order
The Ministry of Justice’s analysis of Rory Stewart’s 10 prisons project are in! Looks like he would have got to keep his job. They found that rate of assaults (assaults per 1000 prisoners) fell faster in 10 prisons than the average in all prisons.
And elsewhere? A moving essay on how verbal and physical abuse drove one police officer out of the force…
Neighbourhood services
The latest local government spending and reserves numbers are out! One thing they show is that usable council reserves (that is, reserves excluding those earmarked specifically for schools and public health) increased from £17.5bn in 2017/18 to £18.3bn in 2018/19. Which is weird, right? How can councils complain about having no money when they’ve seemingly got cash to stow away? Fortunately, the Institute for Fiscal Studies are here to explain how. Councils received more revenues from business rates and central government grants revenue than they expected to, so were able to add more to their reserves.
Good report from the Housing, Communities, and Local Government select committee on local government funding and the 2019 Spending Review. A detailed analysis of the pressures local government is under; the effects of changing the local government funding system; and what the Government could do to address them.
Incredibly wonky — but I very much like their recommendation that MHCLG should publish their assessments of inflationary pressures for different local public services alongside the local government finance settlement. Seems like a sensible way to present a more honest picture of whether changes in spending power represent a real ability to spend more on services.
We’re also happy that they agree with us about the importance of collecting performance data as well as spending data, naturally.
Last but not least, the latest New Local Government Network Leadership Index is out, and finds that the average level of confidence in meeting adult social care needs is 38.3, down from 44 recorded in the last quarter. Average confidence in delivering children’s services is also down to 40.4, from 45.4 last quarter.
