Jessica Sellick

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Children’s social care at breaking point, council leaders warn

New analysis by the Local Government Association (LGA ) has revealed that in 2015/2016 councils surpassed their children’s social care budgets by £605 million in order to protect children at immediate risk of harm.

More than 170,000 children were subject to child protection enquiries in 2015/2016, compared to 71,800 in 2005/2006 – a 140% increase in 10 years. Over the same period the number of children on child protection plans also increased by almost 24,000.

The LGA describes how ongoing cuts to local authority budgets are forcing many areas to make extremely difficult decisions about how to allocate increasingly scarce resources. The LGA is warning that the pressures facing children’s services are rapidly becoming unsustainable, with a £2 billion funding gap expected by 2020.

The huge financial pressures councils are under, coupled with the spike in demand for child protection support, mean that the limited money councils have available is increasingly being taken up with the provision of urgent help for children and families already at crisis point, leaving very little to invest in early intervention.

LGA analysis shows that government funding for the Early Intervention Grant has been cut by almost £500 million since 2013, and is projected to drop by a further £183 million by 2020 – representing a 40% reduction by the end of the decade.

Without this funding, councils have found it increasingly difficult to invest in the early help services that can prevent children entering the social care system, and help to manage needs within families to avoid them escalating.

I wonder what impact these extremely difficult decisions are having for children and young people in rural areas, current service delivery and gaps in provision?

Expanding undergraduate medical education

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For a health and care project I’ve been spending lots of time looking at workforce data/stocktakes and the issues that affect workforce recruitment and retention in rural areas. Now the Department of Health has announced that it will increase the number of student places at medical schools in England by 1,500.

From next year, existing medical schools will be able to offer an extra 500 places to future doctors. Another 1,000 places will be allocated across the country, based on an open bidding process. The bidding process will be supervised by Health Education England and the Higher Education Funding Council for England.

The extra places will be targeted at under-represented social groups such as lower income students, as well as regions that usually struggle to attract trainee medics. The government has also pledged to ensure the places are allocated to medical schools who will work closely with their local communities to help talented students from disadvantaged backgrounds become doctors.

Alongside the plans to train 1,500 more medical students, the government will also fund 10,000 additional training places for nurses, midwives and allied health professionals. Some of these places will be available to students next month.

Alongside this, and of particular interest to RSN members, the Department has published the Government’s response to the consultation on expanding undergraduate medical education.

The response explicitly references rural in calling for the bidding criteria to ‘align expansion to local NHS workforce need with an emphasis on priority geographical areas, including rural and coastal areas’; (page 6); and highlights the challenges of recruiting to rural and coastal areas because of ‘distance to an urban centre’ (page 16).

This reflects a recent discussion I had with medical undergraduates – how can we increase the probability of newly qualified clinicians taking up and staying in a medical job in a rural area? Ivan and I are working on this now and have some ideas…

Save your local! Should volunteers help keep our public libraries open?

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With debates continuing over what constitutes providing a ‘comprehensive library service’ (distance, time and access in rural areas?) and following the Arts Councils Innovation Fund this piece provides examples from the hundreds of libraries still open because voluntary staff have stepped in.

Readers checking a book out of the village library might not immediately notice much of a difference, but Congresbury is the latest public library to haven been handed over “to the community”. You may be used to libraries being run by volunteers – maybe your local is – but this structure is relatively new.

Over the last decade, as many libraries began closing across the UK due to swingeing cuts to local authority funding by central government – 121 libraries closed last year alone – some have instead been handed over by councils to the community to run.

Since librarian Ian Anstice began charting the cuts to UK libraries on his campaigning website Public Libraries News in 2010, 500 of the UK’s 3,850 remaining libraries have now been taken over, at least in part, by volunteers. “I’ve been looking at the count going up steadily for the last few years,” says Anstice. “In 2010, there were a handful – perhaps 10 in the whole country. So this is quite a staggering change.”

Paid library staff fell by almost 1,000 in the year to March 2016, from 18,028 to 17,064, according to official figures from the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (Cipfa). In the same period, volunteer numbers rose by more than 3,000, from 41,402 to 44,501.

Anstice warns that the rise in volunteer-run libraries is masking how dramatic the decline in the library service actually is. “[Closure numbers] would be double if volunteer libraries were not taken into account,” he says. “It’s diverting pressure from councils and, in a way, making austerity that bit easier to live with. It is a trend that will only continue while there’s no effective statutory protection for libraries.”

But expecting the public to have to volunteer in order to keep their local library open is, in the words of Mandy Powell, “frustrating”. Powell works for the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (Cilip), which is currently campaigning for the government to “fulfil their statutory responsibilities to taxpayers” to provide a quality public library service. Like DCMS, Cilip is adamant that volunteers are not a replacement for paid professionals.

“Volunteers are fearful they will lose their libraries, so rather than be faced with that, people think of volunteering … I can understand why people go that route but they should never have been in the position to have to make that decision,” Powell says. “Volunteers have a brilliant role to play in boosting capacity and outreach but they shouldn’t be compelled to take over running the service.”

For the moment, many volunteers are taking the strain.

Collaboration with communities is key to the future of local government

Many local authorities are implementing new models of place-based working (person centred, bottom up approaches to meet the needs of people in their area) and in some cases elected members have become community facilitators in managing competing resident interests whilst ensuring inclusivity and accountability.

This article provides an overview of a Big Lottery funded initiative working with 150 communities investing £1 million in each over a ten year period. As Big Local communities move from planning to delivery, Local Trust is beginning to see the lessons emerging from the neighbourhoods being supported.

LGiU and  Local Trust have undertaken a year-long project to define and promote Community Collaboration and uncover the best examples of it in practice. They have been asking how councillors can actively support communities to lead their own projects by facilitating conversations, using their network and influence, and advocating within their local authority.

The Arches Local area, which sits within new civil society minister Tracey Crouch’s constituency in Chatham, is one of the examples highlighted in the report. With support from their local councillors, a group of local residents spearheading delivery of their Big Local plan won funding to support a pocket park project in a particularly deprived neighbourhood in their area.

When the group started working on planting new trees in the park, people came out of nearby houses to tell them not to bother, believing – on the basis of past experience – that the park would only be vandalised. Later, there was indeed a call to say that vandals had uprooted the trees and broken the new fence. But by the time assistance arrived, there was no problem to be seen.

The local community had already replanted the trees and mended the fence. When it came to the opening of the park, councillors helped by linking the project with local CCGs, the press and other groups, and what had been abandoned waste ground is now a well-used space.

Whilst a pocket park in Chatham is an initiative whose impact is largely local to its immediate neighbourhood, the Arches Local’s growing and maturing relationship with its local authority partners provide wider lessons. Collaborative relationships can help share responsibility more effectively between residents and local authorities and in the process deliver outcomes more effectively for both.

This ‘dying city’ is determined to save itself

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In my 10+ years working in rural areas, I’ve often considered what makes people take on responsibility for the delivery of services ‘on their own account’: if a facility or service is under-threat, something is proposed that local residents don’t agree with and/or there are inspirational people living there (with skills, capacity and drive who want to enthuse others to make things happen)? Residents in Palatka in the United States, fed up with waiting for federal and state government support, have adopted a self-reliant approach and this article describes how they hope to revive the town they love.

Palatka, a city of 10,400 swaddled by potato farms and a paper mill that employs a small fraction of the workers it once did, is desperate for an economy to call its own. Abandoned by retailers that have moved out of their city, and disappointed that President Trump hasn’t yet delivered on his promise to restore economic opportunity to small communities, the people here say they don’t have much choice.

The alternative would be to allow their beloved home to become the next example of a dying American small town. To help save it, some have started homegrown carwashes and small restaurants and bars selling craft beers. Others have worked with developers to build apartments downtown. And officials here are striving to turn the riverfront, a resource that is unique to their city, into a future hub for tourism and a draw for retirees.

“We have to tap into our locals, our entrepreneurial spirit and our aspirations to substitute what is happening around us,” said Hill, 44, who grew up here, left to get degrees from Howard University and the University of Florida, and returned to open a law practice.

In some ways, the strategy of self-reliance is a return to the city’s past. For decades, Palatka’s leaders and residents had embraced their bubble. Politicians rejected plans over the years to build highways that would have connected Palatka to Interstates 75 and 95, spurring growth. Back then, they were afraid growth might change things too much. From the city’s founding, residents relied on the river to attract thousands of jobs. It once brought in a furniture manufacturing plant and a paper mill.

Over the past two decades, however, the small city has been forced to contend with the realities of the global economy. The furniture manufacturer closed in 2003; and automation and competition led to jobs at the paper mill being slashed by a third, to 850, over the past 12 years. By 2013, local leaders were horrified to learn that an expert hired by the Florida League of Cities had found that Palatka was the state’s only “dying city.”

Hill figured the city would need that kind of moxie, just on a larger scale. Everyone had to hustle. When Suggs heard that the owner of Bass Pro Shops was coming to town for a bass tournament this year, he and the mayor traveled to the private airport to try to persuade him to build a store in Palatka.

There have been a few good signs. The paper mill announced in June that it was adding a new processor to the factory, bringing 80 more jobs to the community. Georgia-Pacific was also working with the local school board to train high school students to prepare them for the manufacturing jobs of today.

“We have confidence that Palatka and the surrounding area can support the kind of skilled employees we need now, but more importantly, in the future,” said Karen Cole, a company spokeswoman.

New snake species discovered in Britain…despite living under our noses all along

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Back to the recurrent theme of charismatic mega fauna in Hinterland, great excitement this week as a new snake species has been discovered. The barred grass snake (not to be confused with the common grass snake) is found in lowland areas of southern England, where it lives close to water feeding on amphibians such as frogs, toads and newts. It can grow up to three feet in length, but unlike adders, is not venomous!