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ОглавлениеNew Labour, children’s services and the third sector
This chapter provides an overview of the concept of prevention within child welfare, particularly under the New Labour government (1997–2010). Coming to power in 1997, New Labour placed considerable focus, and financial investment, on reducing child poverty and social exclusion, and increasing universal early intervention support and coordination between services. The role of the voluntary sector became mainstream in the provision of children’s services, with the launch of several high-profile initiatives such as Sure Start, the Children’s Fund and the Connexions service.
In this chapter we demonstrate that social policy encapsulates child welfare from several alternative perspectives, often corresponding to whatever the current dominant social conceptualisation of childhood and the welfare state may be within that period (Hardiker et al, 1989; 1991). Focusing on the concept of ‘prevention’ within child welfare and building on these shifting understandings of childhood, and the concerns for children, this chapter explores how social policy operationalised under the Labour government, developed strategies to tackle issues surrounding children and young people who are considered disadvantaged, vulnerable or at risk and mobilised the voluntary sector within this response.
Every Child Matters
Following on from the Children Act 1989, the Every Child Matters Green Paper (DfES, 2003) and the Children Act 2004 enshrined in law a commitment for state intervention in the private realm of the family. The Green Paper covered three principal themes: early intervention and effective prevention, supporting parents and carers, and accountability, integration and workforce reform. Furthermore, it articulated five outcomes that all children should achieve – being healthy, staying safe, enjoying life and achieving, making a positive contribution, and achieving economic wellbeing. With the aim of improving the wellbeing of all children, this paper set out the requirement for agencies and services to work together, share information effectively and in turn provide evidence against a set of performance indicators. The Every Child Matters Green Paper (DfES, 2003) and the following Every Child Matters: Change for children (DfES, 2004) were built upon evidence suggesting that early intervention would have the best outcomes and most positive impact for the life chances of children, highlighting the need for preventative services.
The Children Act 2004 delivered the legislative changes required to support this new agenda, including the promotion of agencies to work together and integration of education and children’s social services within local authorities. Emphasising the need for services to cooperate and share information, the creation of Local Safeguarding Children Boards promoted and monitored the effectiveness of safeguarding among agencies working with children. These legislative changes saw the introduction of several new initiatives including ‘Contactpoint’, a database to capture the amount of contact children had with statutory services; development of shared assessment tools to support social work practitioners; and updating of statutory guidance for all professionals working with children to understand their responsibilities for the welfare and safeguarding of children. In addition, an existing holistic framework for assessing children in need, the Common Assessment Framework (CAF), was widely embedded and adopted across agencies (France et al, 2010).
Labour and tackling social exclusion of children
The establishment of the Social Exclusion Unit (SEU) in 1997 marked out the newly elected Labour Party’s aspiration for change. Employing a range of individuals from across local government, the voluntary sector and business, the emphasis of the SEU was on the importance of joined-up thinking and working together. As such, the SEU defined social exclusion as ‘a shorthand term for what can happen when people or areas suffer from a combination of linked problems such as unemployment, poor skills, low incomes, poor housing, high crime environments, bad health and family breakdown’ (SEU, 1998). Recognising the multifaceted nature of social exclusion and committed to the idea of universal service provision, Labour sought to tackle this through five broad programmes (Percy-Smith, 2000). These included enabling people to work; dealing with issues such as crime and antisocial behaviour in poorer communities; integrated help for children and young people; access to services for those in the poorest areas; and making government work better.
Arguably, the establishment of the SEU brought social exclusion to the fore of government politics. In addition, Labour’s promise to eradicate child poverty by 2020, further cemented their commitment to tackling this issue. A central report published by the SEU in 1997 identified three responses to tackle social exclusion. The first encompassed the ‘New Deals’ programme which targeted failing statutory services such as schools, health and crime prevention, and provided interventions to support identified socially excluded groups including lone parents, the unemployed and the disabled. The second response provided funding to support regeneration in perceived disadvantaged communities. The third response advocated a ‘joined-up’ working arrangement involving cross cutting policy teams. One of these policy teams, Policy Action Team 12 (PAT12) (SEU, 2000) highlighted several priorities to focus on regarding children and young people. PAT12 identified gaps in preventative services for children and young people, recommended a greater emphasis on early intervention, identified the need for greater coordination of local provision and recommended increased flexibility in the services provided to meet the needs of children and young people more effectively. In 2006, the SEU merged with the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit under the Cabinet Office. The new Social Exclusion Task Force launched off this platform to provide central government with strategic advice and policy analysis to tackle social exclusion.
With social exclusion firmly positioned as a major policy priority, backed up with a range of government initiatives, and a significant focus upon targeting children and young people deemed to be at risk of social exclusion, the stage was set for the launch of both support and preventative initiatives. Based on the recommendations from PAT12 and in keeping with child welfare reforms, three new initiatives were launched. These initiatives were Sure Start (targeted at children aged 0–5 years) in 1997, the Children’s Fund (targeted at children aged 5–13 years in 2000 and Connexions service (targeted at young people aged 13–19 years) also created in 2000, all situated within a ‘risk and protection-focused prevention paradigm’ (France and Utting, 2005). Arguably all three of these programmes were established to ‘reduce risk factors, build resilience, and promote protective factors within the domains of the family, school, and community, or with the individual child, intervening early to reduce the risks of future negative outcomes’ (Evans and Pinnock, 2007: 22).
The government founded the Sure Start programme to help prevent social exclusion by targeting families with very young children. Initially specifically aimed at children living in poverty Sure Start facilitated cross-agency funding, in areas of deprivation, to facilitate the statutory sector, voluntary sector, community organisations and parents and families coming together to tackle inequalities at the earliest opportunity (Brown and Dillenburger, 2004). The central aim of this service was improving life chances through increased access to family support services, early intervention services and health advice (Eistenstadt, 2001). As an attempt of continued support through a child’s life, established in 2000, the Children’s Fund was a national preventative service initiative for children aged 5–13 years.
The Children’s Fund initiative aimed to deliver ‘preventative services which provide support for young people and their families before they reach crisis, with the aim of reducing the future probability of poor outcomes and maximising life chances’ (CYPU, 2001: 7). Like the Sure Start programme, the initial model of delivery centred on locally established partnership setting priorities. Each local authority area had to draw together a local partnership made up of representatives from the local authority, voluntary and community sector, health, youth services, youth justice and other key stakeholders, to manage and oversee the programme delivery (CYPU, 2001). Funded from 2000 until 2008, in three waves, with a total budget of £960 million, much of the funding was ring fenced for the voluntary sector. Funding was released to each of the 149 local authority Children Fund partnerships following the acceptance of a plan by local partnerships. Central to the Children’s Fund objective was the requirement, ‘to provide additional resources over and above those provided through mainstream statutory funding, specific programmes and though specific earmarked funding streams. It should engage and support voluntary and community organisations in playing an active part and should enable the full range of services to work together’ (NECF, 2004). This commitment solidified the relationship between the Children’s Fund initiative and the voluntary sector. Unsurprisingly, as a result, the Children’s Fund became a major source of funding support for voluntary sector organisations delivering early intervention services.
Central pillars of the New Labour approach
Central to the approach to children’s services adopted by New Labour, were two core themes, Children’s Trusts, to oversee strategic direction and accountability of services, and children’s centres, to ensure universal and targeted access for all. The Children Act 2004 set out instructions as to how services should be governed by local authorities and how services should work together. It enshrined much of what was recommended by Laming (DoH, 2003) and established the statutory duty that required every local authority to work with partners, through Children’s Trusts, to devise and implement strategies to improve outcomes for children aged 0–19 years. Children’s Trusts existed as local partnerships bringing together the organisations responsible for services for children, young people and families in a shared commitment to improving children’s lives.
The Children’s Trust governance framework demanded that local authorities show greater accountability for decision making and spending, and involve children, young people and families in decisions that affect them. The aim of the Children’s Trusts was to develop, at a senior level across the local authority, responsive and effective health, social care and education services for children (Fitzgerald and Kay, 2008) which was pivotal to the creation of Labour’s Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF). To meet this demand the local authority had to develop existing services and commission new services (Fitzgerald and Kay, 2008) to facilitate joint planning and ensure arrangements for integrated working between agencies involved in the care and education of children.
Children’s centres were established to act as a wrap-around service-hub, designed to ensure ‘every child mattered’. At the local authority level children’s centres developed from Sure Start children’s centres which were based on a family support ethos (Featherstone et al, 2013), whereby children from deprived postcode areas were assured a nursery placement (Eisenstadt, 2011). Sure Start children’s centres were located in areas of ‘high disadvantage’, and provided a service that gave access to 0–5 year old children for 10 hours a day, five days a week for 48 weeks of the year. In areas of ‘less disadvantage’ the offer provided was a ‘drop in’ arrangement with hours to ‘suit local need’ (Barker, 2009). As part of their offer, these centres hosted statutory and voluntary services for children and families including access to Job Centre Plus employment advice, various health services (with access to midwives and health visitors) and education services. In targeted areas further support was available including access to police and legal advice in a bid to tackle domestic violence. The links to employment services for parents included a joined-up approach to training providers, some of whom were also located in some children’s centres. Signposting was also part of the children’s centres’ remit, to include benefits advice along with library services and relationship support, although these services may not have actually been provided on the site of the children’s centre (Barker, 2009).
The children’s centres arrangement to facilitate multi-agency working was replicated by organisations such as social care services and education that were physically and geographically restructured so that a variety of multi-agency workers shared buildings. New Labour’s (1997–2010) intention was that any child who had needs identified under a ‘common assessment framework’ would be best served at a single point of access, by a lead professional and would have the support of a team around the child, as opposed to the child and their family being seen in isolation by a variety of professionals. Professionals were to share information with the aim to minimise risk by identifying a child’s needs and responding to them before they potentially escalated.
Children’s centres were ‘intended to provide a universal service for families that should ‘reflect local need’ (Barker, 2009: 82; DfES, 2006), thus creating a governance arrangement that was a hybrid of a targeted universalism within service provision; a ‘key component in the ECM agenda’ (Barker, 2009: 88). Such support was not to last, between 2010 and 2018 around 1,000 children’s centres were closed.
The third sector
Alongside the increased focus on partnership working within children’s services, Labour promoted an opening up of public services, encouraging delivery of services outside of the public sector. When Labour first came to power in 1997, they brought with them the concept of ‘the third sector’. Anthony Giddens propelled this term into public policy in his work The third way (1998). Giddens, a prominent leading British sociologist, suggested the reorganisation of views on modern society and politics (1979; 1984; 1998). The term ‘third way’ was essentially an attempt at developing a centrist platform which offered voters a potential pathway forwards from across the political spectrum as a balance between the free market economics presented by the neoliberal ideology and the social justice discourse presented from more left-wing liberal ideological frameworks. The term aimed ‘to capture a new, and broader, notion of what could and should, be the focus of political and party attention’ (Alcock, 2010: 158). Encapsulating this, a series of new institutions paved the way for the creation of the Office of the Third Sector (OTS) in 2006. The term ‘third sector’ brought with it a further redefinition and reconceptualisation of the voluntary sector. It sought to capture organisations acting within the voluntary sphere by broadening the definition to encompass the legally constituted charities, voluntary groups, faith-based charities, industrial and provident societies, social enterprises, cooperatives, community interest companies and companies limited by guarantee.
During the 1980s and 1990s, several of the threads from which Labour would build the framework for the concept of the third sector were already underway, propelled by the Conservative government. Arguably the most important of these threads was the work of an independent commission chaired by Nicholas Deakin, set up by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO), who produced a report entitled ‘Meeting the challenge of change: voluntary action in the 21st century’ (Commission on the Future of the Voluntary Sector, 1996) commonly known as the Deakin Commission report. The Deakin Commission report mapped out a vision and principles for the voluntary sector over the following decade. However, largely perceived as reflecting the views of a team of ‘representative bodies’ and lacking in either forward thinking or critical analysis of the sector as a whole, the report was criticised as little more than a consensus document (Lewis, 1999). Although, considering the Conservative government in power at the time of its writing and with a general election on the horizon, it could have been framed as such deliberately (Kendall, 2000a). Nonetheless, the notion of partnership within the report and the suggestion of a ‘concordat’ as a mode of operationalising this partnership between the state and voluntary sector went beyond any of its predecessors, such as the Wolfenden Committee report. Kendall goes onto argue that with this mind it was more of a ‘holding document’ and its blend of ‘timidity and innovation’ could be ‘ultimately argued as successful’ and ‘dynamic in the political context’ (2000a).
Further to the establishment of a concordat the Deakin Commission report included several other recommendations which later came to fruition under Labour, including a new legal definition of charities, the establishment of taskforces to develop the concordat (later to be known as the Compact), alongside recommendations around tax issues for charities, capacity building and quality assurance. In total the report detailed 61 recommendations, with approximately half of them aimed at the government for action. Largely ignored by the Conservative government at the time, Labour welcomed these recommendations and they heavily influenced Labour thinking around the concept and politicisation of the third sector.
Therefore, for Labour the third way ‘was intended to capture a rejection of public service policy planning that relied primarily on the state (as supposedly was the case with previous Labour governments) or the market (as had been the case under the Thatcher governments of the 1980s)’ (Alcock, 2010: 163). Labour were keen to highlight a ‘newness’ in their thinking which offered a real alternative to previous administrations. Arguably, there was little real change promoting the notion of mixed state and market forces for the delivery of the most effective services possible. The promotion of the ‘third way’, with the development of the broader sector term of the ‘third sector’ created the possibility of a ‘new space for a proactive role for the sector as a tailor-made alternative to both the state and the market’ (Alcock, 2010: 164). The third sector therefore occupied a unique position, as neither state nor private sector; it was presented as a genuine alternative.
This ‘mixed welfare’ was widely promoted by Labour and thus the voluntary sector was pulled centrally into political and policy debates, a position it had not held before and would give to rise to a new relationship between the central and local government, and the voluntary sector. In his Fabian pamphlet (1998), Tony Blair, then Labour party leader, defined the ‘third way’ stating that it recognises the need for government to forge new partnerships with the voluntary sector. Blair argued that, whether in education, health, social work, crime prevention or the care of children, ‘enabling’ government strengthens civil society rather than weakening it, and helps families and communities improve their own performance … the state, voluntary sector and individuals working together (Blair, 1998: 14).
This commitment pulled the voluntary sector centre stage, mainstreaming their activity and engagement, or as Kendall (2009) termed it ‘hyperactive mainstreaming’ through a number of very proactive moves including the creation of new institutions, commissioning out services, partnership formations and a rise in political status. However, the role of the voluntary sector is underpinned by an economic discourse, which is potentially in a juxtaposition to the social justice discourse presented by the sector itself. As voluntary sector organisations increasingly engage in the delivery of policy, tensions arise between their responsibility to service users and participants versus the need to deliver services in an increasingly competitive and demanding market (Taylor-Gooby and Wallace, 2009).
During the 1980s and 1990s, much of the strategic interface between the state and the voluntary sector took place through the Voluntary Services Unit, located in the Home Office. The association with the Home Office presents this unit as having a remit of social control and policing. Labour rebranded this in 2001 as the Active Community Unit, and expanded its remit and budget significantly, allocating an additional £300 million three-year budget to support an infrastructure development support programme for the sector aimed at improving voluntary activity (Alcock, 2010). Shortly after, the creation of the Civil Renewal Unit focused on community action. The later merger of these two units, with a third unit, the Charities Unit, created the Active Communities Directorate. This expansion of both policy influence and budget remit sent a clear message to the voluntary sector in terms of both defining and mainstreaming voluntary sector activities. Similarly, in the Treasury in 2006, a new Charity and Third Sector Unit formed, and the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) became the home to the newly formed Social Enterprise Unit (SEU). With the creation of the new institutions, also came the new legal structures. To incorporate organisations in the voluntary sector that traded as businesses, through reinvesting profits in the business and had clear social or environmental purposes, the term ‘social enterprise’ gained momentum. Partly to incorporate these as a legal form, community interest companies emerged. Community interest companies were introduced as a legal form under the Companies Act 2006. The formation of these new units and legal structures risked constructing a confusing landscape for policy creation and engagement of the voluntary sector. Thus in 2006 this was simplified and consolidated by the creation of the Office of the Third Sector (OTS), which was situated within the Cabinet Office, centralising the voluntary sector within the heart of government (Hilton, 2011) and securing this through the allocation of a Minister for the Third Sector. The creation of the OTS in 2006 confirmed and solidified Labour’s deliberate attempts to ‘expand the reach of policy intervention into areas not traditionally associated with the voluntary action in the country’ (Alcock, 2010: 159). Alcock (2010) argues that one of the most significant features of the OTS was the remit of the third sector, rather than the voluntary sector. The term ‘third sector’ expands our understanding of the sector to encompass a variety of organisations beyond that of the traditionally understood charitable and voluntary organisations, to include community interest companies, social enterprises, community mutuals and cooperatives.
Further cementing Labour’s commitment towards the third sector, the development of several ‘horizontal’ infrastructure and capacity building programmes, backed with significant investment emerged (Kendall, 2000a). The Deakin Commission Report had made numerous recommendations in light of the relationship between public agencies and the voluntary sector including the suggestion that there should be a governing concordat, a framework of guiding principles to oversee this relationship. This was realised when the Home Office published a national Compact in England (1998), providing a model for the development of the Compact in individual areas. Local Compacts reflected the relationships between separate public bodies, that is, the National Health Service, police, local authorities and the third sector. In a review of relevant policy and political literature, Kendall (2000a) argues that the notion of the Compact was ‘completely without precedent, representing an unparalleled step in the positioning of the third sector in public policy’ (Kendall, 2000a: 2). As such, this, combined with the institutional changes discussed, represented a ‘clear step change’ (Kendall, 2000a) for the relationship between the voluntary sector and the national government.
The Compact however was not a legal document; it was a proactive agreement, requiring all parties to willingly and actively participate. This led to several issues arising including different levels of participation by various agencies and third sector organisations due to capacity and ability. In tackling this, the government then set up the Compact Commission in 2007 to oversee the implementation and highlight good practice. As such, the Compact continued to gain momentum and became a key tool of engagement highlighting new government commitment to the engagement of the third sector, recognition of the need to work in partnership and integration of the voluntary sector into the political and economic discourse.
There was growing recognition of the need for infrastructure development within the voluntary sector to facilitate voluntary organisations to participate actively within the principles outlined within the Compact, including the ability to tender for contracts to deliver public services. This brought forth the debate of the marketization of the voluntary sector (Milbourne and Cushman, 2013). Further underpinning this, Labour committed to a number of investments to support the voluntary sector’s growth and development, including establishing the Futurebuilders fund, initially £125 million over three years (2005–2008), which expanded to a total of £215 million and extended over a further three years (2008–2011). This funding provided grants and loans to assist voluntary organisations participating in the commissioning process. The delivery of the Futurebuilders programme was outsourced to a new independent agency in 2008, the Adventure Capital Fund, which in turn established the Social Investment Business (SIB) (Alcock, 2010). The SIB became the main source of government investment for the infrastructure and development of the third sector through administering a range of programmes including the £100 million Social Enterprise Investment for social enterprises tendering to deliver health and social care services, the £70 million Communitybuilders fund to provide support for smaller voluntary sector organsiations. The SIB also hosted the £150 million ChangeUp funding programme to support infrastructure development organisations, such as national charities like NCVO and local Councils for Voluntary Services.
In 2006, the responsibility of ChangeUp was handed to a new government agency established by the OTS called Capacitybuilders, a name that reflected the ongoing commitment by the government to build up the capacity of individual organisations to deliver services as part of the wider market. The public investment for the voluntary sector outside of government investment also continued to grow throughout the Labour term. The introduction of the National Lottery programme in the early 1990s, distributed additional funding from the sale of national lottery tickets to charities through a number of Big Lottery programmes. With a much larger pool of resources to access funding from, the size of the voluntary sector expanded, as did the culture of contractualism in relation to this funding. For example, within just one portion of the voluntary sector, general charities, there was a 28% increase in income from 2000 to 2007, with approximately just under one third coming from statutory sources (Kane et al, 2010).
Nonetheless, many critics do not believe that Labour delivered on the promises it set out in the ‘third way’ or for the voluntary sector as a whole. For example, the emphasis on contracting bought to the fore a focus on the relationship between government and the voluntary sector. The implementation of the Compact, which was set to provide a framework for the relations, appeared to lack impetus at points. Established in 1998, it took until 2002 for a senior civil servant to assume responsibility for the Compact, thus demonstrating its lack of political priority. It then took until 2003 for the completion of underpinning codes, until 2006 for the appointment of a commissioner and until 2007, a full nine years after the initial Compact was launched, for the Commission for the Compact to be established, a bespoke agency, which tried to meet a number of targets already missed (Zimmeck, 2010). It took a total of ten years from the launch of the Compact for the first Local Compact Annual Conference to be held and it was not until 2009 that the final local Compact was signed, which was a full five years later than the target date. In her examination of the history of the Compact, Zimmeck (2010) argues that the government failed to recognise the size of the task before them and provided insufficient financial investment, lacked meaningful engagement and failed to ‘establish the credibility of arrangements for evaluating and resolving problems’ (Zimmeck, 2010: 127). Carrington (2002) agrees, suggesting that the government did not show ‘visible and enthusiastic engagement’ (p 5) with the Compact and therefore undermined its credibility. Undermining credibility further internal governmental decisions such as the government terminating the ‘Campaigning Research Programme’, ‘without warning and without consultation, shortly after naming the grant winners’, (Zimmeck, 2010: 127) fundamentally went against the principles of the Compact. Secure funding agreements, which lasted for a minimum of three years in term and delivered full cost recovery, were central themes to the Compact. However, in 2007 the Commission for the Compact identified that only 54% of government contracts met this target (Diamond, 2007: 7) and 68% of charities reported having funding agreements of less than a year (Charity Commission, 2007a: 14). Alongside this in 2006, only 12% of charities reported achieving full cost recovery across all of their services, while 43% said that they had not achieved full cost recovery in any of their services (Charity Commission, 2007a: 10).
In summary, Labour’s commitment to the third sector, to the policy development of the ‘Third Way’ and to the promotion of the mixed welfare state as a way of achieving this brought the voluntary sector to the centre of public policy. However, underpinning this was an accountability driven discourse that focused on outputs and outcomes. The development of this focus on outcomes as a ‘what works’ approach gave charitable organisations the opportunity to start bidding and tendering for services previously delivered by the state (Alcock and Kendall, 2010) through commissioning processes (explored in further depth in Part III). Nonetheless, the policy for an increased involvement by the voluntary sector in service delivery coupled with a local governance agenda to evolve the role of the voluntary sector in promoting citizenship and civic engagement was firmly established (Alcock and Kendall, 2010). The significant financial investment in, and the infrastructure development of, the voluntary sector attempted to make a reality of Blair’s vision statement in 1998, when promoting support for the voluntary sector: ‘They [voluntary sector organisations] enable individuals to contribute to the development of their communities. By so doing they promote citizenship, help to re-establish a sense of community and make a crucial contribution to our aim of a just and inclusive society’ (Home Office, 1998: 1).
Despite the outlined issues and criticisms, throughout the 13 years in which Labour were in power, the voluntary sector and the state enjoyed an unprecedented close relationship. As argued, on election, Labour fought hard to present the ‘Third Way’ as new ideology which distanced it from previous Labour governments and the previous Conservative administration. However, though it is likely, as Alcock (2011) identifies, ‘history may judge the New Labour era to have been a high-water mark in partnership between the state and the sector’ (p 179) the distance between the ‘Third Way’ and the ‘Big Society’ is not as great as it would first appear. Therefore, in 2010, when Labour lost the general election and the Conservative-led Coalition came into power what really changed for relationship between the state and the voluntary sector? We explore this in depth in Chapter 2.
Conclusion
In this chapter we have outlined how policy and the governance of interdisciplinary discourse latterly emerged and became a particular configuration of Blair’s New Labour Modernisation agenda. The immediate background to this is illustrated by what was termed ‘the new children’s workforce’ (Barker, 2009) whereby policy named a wide variety of careers and jobs from both statutory and voluntary services. The consequence (or enactment) of these policies involved changes in emphasis in the way accountability, participation and inclusion were managed. In theory, the aim of the Common Assessment Framework (CAF) was to provide an assessment tool that could be used by non-social work professional employees in education, children’s social care, health and allied professions. The introduction of the Common Assessment Framework and the Every Child Matters agenda marked an intent by government to ensure that agencies worked together in meeting the needs of all children. Its emphasis was corporate responsibility for all children with the intention of safeguarding children and early intervention when necessary, rather than reacting with too little too late after neglect had taken place.
As we have explored in this chapter, Labour’s initiatives, reforms, policies and services for children, young people and families centred on the concept of social exclusion (Artaraz et al, 2007). There were several influential factors, which underpinned this, one of which was the ongoing and recognised poor performance by the UK in terms of Child Poverty in comparison to European counterparts. In 2007, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) published the much-debated report, Child Poverty in Perspective. This report suggested that children in the UK were among the unhappiest, most materially impoverished and suffering the poorest relationships within Europe. Having pledged in 2000 to eradicate child poverty by 2020 this was a difficult political blow for the Labour government, who had dedicated a significant amount of political attention to tackling social exclusion as a means of eradicating poverty. However, this ranking used data collected in 2000. An updated version of this research based predominantly on data collected 2009 to 2010 indicated an improved position with UK rising from 21st out of 21 in 2000/2001 to a mid-table position of 16th out of 29 in 2009/2010 (UNICEF, 2013).
With the continued rising concerns about poverty and the long-term impacts of social exclusion, the national government and local authorities sought to provide preventative interventions for children considered to be socially excluded, and thus likely to experience negative outcomes as an adult, to divert them instead onto an inclusive trajectory. As part of the response to this problem, Labour launched two central programmes, Sure Start and the National Children’s Fund programme. The Sure Start programme was established in 1998 with the aim of ‘giving children the best possible start in life’ by increasing and improving childcare, early education and access to family support (Glass, 1999). Targeted at families with children aged 0 to 5 the programme particularly focused upon outreach and community development work. Initially planned as a ten-year programme of support through nationally-controlled Sure Start local programmes, in 2003 Labour outlined a longer-term intention to support the work, and in 2005 transferred control of the programme to local government, setting up Sure Start children’s centres. This programme has continued to the present day, although it has not gone unscathed under the Coalition and Conservative reforms, with a number of councils announcing cuts to their Sure Start programmes in 2010/11 and over 1,000 closures of children’s centres across the country.
Coupled with the Sure Start programme, was the National Children’s Fund programme. Launched in 2000, this programme set out to tackle social exclusion and poverty among 5–13 year-olds. With a total of £960 million allocated between 2000 and 2008 this programme targeted the lower end of social exclusion, when children were identified as requiring intervention to prevent escalation of issues that did not require professional or institutionalised services. In this context, preventative services have been widely assumed to be an area best addressed by the voluntary sector, and therefore distribution of this budget targeted supporting voluntary sector providers in delivering these services (Artaraz et al, 2007; Morris et al, 2009). This assumption is thought to have been ‘fed perhaps by the level of responsiveness and flexibility shown by the voluntary and community sector to venture in the “new frontier” of preventative services defined by the (then) current child welfare agenda’ (Artaraz et al, 2007: 308). When the National Children’s Fund programme came to an end in 2008, budgets were pooled within the local authorities and distributed against local priorities outlined in the local Children and Young People’s Plan. Multi-agency working became a common phrase under Labour with the ‘duty to cooperate’ enshrined in the Children Act 2004 section 10, which saw the formation of Children’s Trust Boards in all local authority areas and, in most areas, subsequent Local Children’s Trusts Boards established under these to represent the local communities. Each Children’s Trust Board had to produce and monitor a local Children and Young People’s Plan. However, as we explore in subsequent chapters, this intensive focus on and funding for local support was short lived.
