Contribution
My Lords, I am delighted to add my name to Amendment 107 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Storey. I commend him and his colleagues in the other place, particularly the honourable Member for Twickenham, on their concerted efforts to bring attention to this important fund, which provides support to about 20,000 very vulnerable children who have suffered great trauma. The anecdote that the noble Lord gave of the family he met brought this issue to life very vividly. I also thank other noble Lords who have spoken in this short debate, all of whom have brought great experience, and in particular the noble Lord, Lord Russell, for his remarks, his expertise and the work of the APPG that he co-chairs.
I will not go into detail on the rather unusual set of announcements that the Government made about the fund, first on 1 April and then very shortly afterwards on 22 April, when it was announced that the fair access limit, or funding per child, would, as the noble Lord, Lord Storey, explained, be cut from £5,000 to £3,000 per child per year, and that the £2,500 limit for specialist assessment—which, as I understand it, was in addition to the £5,000—had been abolished. The remaining fund now has to cover both the assessment, judged by the department, I assume, to cost up to £2,500 per child, and the therapy. If we give the department the benefit of the doubt and say that the assessment cost around £1,500, then, being very generous, that leaves about six sessions of funded therapy per year, which for these children is simply insufficient. I am not suggesting that those are the real numbers; they are just my back-of-the-envelope estimates to give the Committee a sense of what is happening here.
Hence the importance of this amendment, which focuses on the per-child funding level and seeks to bring some clarity to the amounts needed. In her Written Ministerial Statement, the Minister said that the ASGF—that is a new acronym for me—
“will still enable those eligible to access a significant package of therapeutic support, tailored to meet their individual needs”.
Can the Minister give the Committee some examples of what the department considers to be a significant package of therapeutic support that could be funded from £3,000, including the assessments?
The issue of therapeutic support is, of course, broader than just this fund. On my visit to Capstone Foster Care, I learned of the difficulty of receiving funding for therapeutic work and the bureaucracy involved in retaining it. This feels so short-sighted as local authorities search for a sound placement—defined in the sector, as I understand it, as a standard placement that does not have additional therapeutic support funding attached to it—which then, perhaps predictably, breaks down and potentially needs to be substituted with a placement in a children’s home at many times the cost.
This is at a time when we hear that funding from integrated care boards for safeguarding work will be cut by around 50% and that the threshold for health involvement is simply too high to be useful. The cuts to the fund will result in a loss of adopters and special guardians, who find—as we heard very powerfully from noble Lords who spoke earlier—that without this support they simply cannot take on these responsibilities. The very late announcement has led to a backlog and will require almost half of applicants to reapply, as their original application does not meet the new threshold.
I wondered what estimate or cost-benefit analysis—and I appreciate that the human cost is far more important than the financial one—the department has done on the savings from the cuts to the fund set against the cost of potential breakdowns. If the Minister does not have those figures with her, perhaps she could write to me with them. As other noble Lords have said, this decision feels like an error, and I hope that the Minister will urge her ministerial colleagues to accept these amendments.