Issue - meetings

To consider a report of the Director of Children’s Services and the Director of Corporate Resources regarding Transformation to 2019 savings proposals

To consider and make recommendation to the Executive Lead Member for Children’s Services on the departmental transformation to 2019 savings proposals and public consultation feedback.

The Committee received a report and presentation from the Director of Children’s Services and his representatives, which provided an overview of the revenue savings proposals for Transformation to 2019 (see Item 6 in the Minute Book).

Members heard an overview of the key findings of the balancing the budget consultation held by the County Council the previous summer, and noted that all of departments in the Council had been asked to proportionately contribute a further 19% saving of their budget by April 2019. For children's services, this resulted in an overall requirement of £30.1m. An overview was provided of the Department’s success in the Transformation to 2017 savings, which had seen a total of £21.5m achieved, including restructuring the family support service, which the Committee had considered in detail.

As the vast majority of the Children's Services spend is external, such as on the cost of placements in foster and residential care, and the entire staffing budget is less that £40m from a £148.9m budget, it would not be possible to find savings only from staffing costs. Therefore a significant proportion of the proposed savings centred around changes in delivering children's social care, and providing only the statutory entitlement under home to school transport, as well as other changes to provision.

The Transformation to 2019 (T19) programme would be a much tougher savings round, as there were no longer minor savings to be found, and cost reduction now required much wider transformational thinking. It was particularly difficult for Children’s Services, as the authority was already lowly-funded, compared to its peers, spends most of its budget externally, and has statutory duties which must be protected. The principles underpinning this programme remained the same, and centred around six core statements:

·         Ensuring a safe and effective social care system;

·         Ensuring sufficient capacity to lead, challenge and improve the schools system to help ensure improved outcomes for all, but particularly more vulnerable groups;

·         Tightly target limited resources according to the needs of children;

·         Secure, targeted, and co-ordinated early help provision;

·         Sustaining and developing high quality and financially competitive sold services;

·         Maximising the opportunities to create efficiencies and maintaining and enhancing services through partnership arrangements.

There were four strands to the T19 programme for social care transformation, which made up the majority of the Children’s Services savings, which included:

·         Reducing the number and cost of children looked after (£17.9m);

·         Infrastructure and organisation redesign (£3m);

·         Review of Swanwick Lodge (£470k); and

·         Reduction in the 0-19 grants (£500k)

There were currently approximately 1,500 children were in care, around 46 per 10,000 children. The Department believed this could be safely reduced by 410 by 2021/22, noting that these figures have to date been rising, but that transformation work had begun to decrease this locally. Hampshire was one of only seven local authorities nationally, picked from the best performing, to take part in a Department for Education pilot aimed at transforming care, noting that with the number of children in care going up year on year, and the average  ...  view the full minutes text for item 21