England is proving no place to be a child
Liverpool University study finds 10,000 extra children placed in care due to poverty
CHILDREN – at least those on the breadline – are paying a cruel price for the state of England, a study shows.
First, they endure the hardships of poverty; second, they are taken from their homes and put into care. Both can have damaging and potentially life-long impacts on the children affected.
As recent reports indicate, England's social care system is in a parlous state.
In May, the Independent Review of Children's Social Care, chaired by Josh MacAlister, published its final report calling for root and branch reform.
“Change is now both morally urgent and financially unavoidable, MacAlister told The Guardian's social policy editor, Patrick Butler. “We have a stark choice: keep pouring money into a faltering system or reform and invest to improve people’s lives and make the system sustainable for the future.”
Poverty doesn't make the task any easier. Indeed, reforming children's social care itself won't touch the deep-rooted and tangled inequalities rife in England today. It's not just social care that needs reform; our society needs an economic overhaul too.
Last month, researchers from the universities of Liverpool and Huddersfield published the findings of a study in The Lancet Public Health journal, providing evidence that poverty is plunging even more children into social care.
They claim that an extra 10,000 children have ended up in care due to impoverished circumstance, leading to an added cost of £1.4 billion for local authorities providing care services.
“This study shows that rising child poverty is putting unnecessary stresses and strains on families, increasing the risk of children being abused or neglected and ending up in the care system,” said senior author, Liverpool's professor of public health and policy, David Taylor-Robinson. “This is all the more shocking since child poverty is preventable in a rich country like the UK.”
According to government figures there were around 12 million children living in England as of March 2021. Of these just under 400,000 (3%) were in the social care system at any one time, but more than 80,000 were in care itself.
Figures cited by charity Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG), meanwhile, claim that 3.9 million children were living in poverty throughout the UK in 2020-21. Children from Black and minority ethnic groups are more likely to be in poverty: 46% compared with 26% of children in White British families.
Unsurprisingly, children in lone parent families suffer short shrift too.
Children in care face adverse health outcomes through the course of their lives, relative to their peers, the study authors point out. In England, over the past decade, the stark rise in their number has coincided with rising child poverty, they add; a “key risk factor” for children entering care.
The last decade, of course, coincides with the main thrust of the Government's policies on welfare reform and austerity. Both of which have contributed to a rising tide of hardship, well documented by a library of research reports and analysis over the years.
In that sense, it is not a stretch to suggest that these children are paying a heavy price for decisions made in Westminster and implemented by Whitehall. Nowadays, we have the cost of living crisis, too; only adding to the hardships.
Back to the study, the researchers from Liverpool and Huddersfield found their evidence in the data they obtained from 147 local authorities collected over five years from 2015 to 2020.
They linked the data on the number of children living in low income families, published by the Department for Work & Pensions, with data from the Department for Education that showed rates of children entering care.
From this, the team estimated the contribution of changing child poverty rates to changes in care entry rates within different areas of the country.
Controlling for trends in employment, they found that between 2015 and 2020, a one percentage point increase in child poverty saw an additional five children enter care per 100,000.
Over the study period, they estimated that 8.1% of children going into care did so because of rising child poverty – the equivalent of over 10,000 additional children.
These are children, it seems fair to say, who might not otherwise have needed to enter the care system.
“This study offers evidence that rising child poverty is a major preventable driver of the increase in children being removed from the family home and taken into local authority care – one of the most drastic State interventions into families’ lives,” said the study's lead author, Davara Bennett, a Liverpool University PhD student.
“In England, the double burden has fallen disproportionately on the North East and parts of the North West. National anti-poverty policies are key to safely tackling adverse trends in care entry. This would, in turn, relieve the unsustainable pressure on local authority budgets increasingly devoted to costly placements for children in care at the expense of preventative children’s services.”
Much like the NHS, it seems, the care system is picking up the pieces of a damaged society; tackling symptoms of causes that lie beyond its reach.
MC