90% of councils set to lose early intervention funds
Author: Kaye Wiggins, LGC |
Nearly nine out of 10 councils are due to lose funding for ‘early intervention’ services such as nursery places and Sure Start centres, despite a government pledge to boost their budgets, LGC analysis shows.
Just 17 of 152 top-tier authorities are set to receive more funding for the service in 2013/14 compared with 2012/13. Sixteen of these are London boroughs, according to figures published by the Department for Education alongside the funding settlement. The other 135 top-tier councils are due to lose cash.
Graham Allen, the Labour MP commissioned by the prime minister to write a report on early intervention, said: ?These figures represent a devastating blow to early intervention. Cutting preventative services will result in higher spending later on, so it is self-defeating.?
The cuts are largely due to a decision by the DfE to take a 150m top-slice from councils’ budgets. A DfE spokeswoman said this money would at some stage be given back to local authorities. However, she said the department could not say whether councils would receive this funding in time for the 2013/14 financial year, how much each council would receive or what they would be required to spend it on.
From 2013/14 councils will receive two funding pots for the services ? an unringfenced budget that covers services such as children’s centres and teenage pregnancy programmes, and a separate fund to provide free nursery places for disadvantaged two year-olds.
LGC analysis of the DfE figures shows councils face a 28% fall in the unringfenced budget, from 2.4bn to 1.7bn. Once the extra funding for the two-year-olds scheme is added in, the total budget for councils’ early intervention services in 2013/14 is 2.2bn – 6% lower than it was in 2012/13.
Paul Woods, finance director at Newcastle City Council, told LGC the figures were likely to mask even bigger reductions in early intervention services. ?For the government to say we have to spend money on nursery placed for two-year-olds is effectively a cut, because that money would otherwise be spent on other early intervention services?, he said. ?Although the figures show that we could lose about 1m, we think our actual risk is about 4.5m because money is being transferred from youth services to fund the nursery places programme.?