Press Story

Local government facing up to £5bn cut as need for social support services rises

A new £100m government programme, based upon the existing ‘Troubled Families’ initiative, would help to improve the lives of some of the most excluded people in society, support the integration of local services, and reform poorly targeted spending, according to a new report published by IPPR today.

An estimated £4.3bn per year is spent on a significant minority of adults experiencing several dimensions of social exclusion in England – in particular homelessness, offending and substance misuse. Of this the large part is spent on tackling the symptoms of problems people face, rather than the causes. But the report shows that spending on the services these individuals rely on is declining at a time of rising need.

IPPR’s reportBreaking Boundaries: Towards a ‘Troubled Lives’ programme recommends that the government should not only maintain levels of spending on this group, but should also seek to achieve much better outcomes from the £4.3bn it currently spends. The existing ‘Troubled Families’ programme is pioneering integrated support and reducing demand for crisis-led services. Despite finding that there are serious weaknesses with the programme, the report argues that it is an example of local integration and tailored support that should be built on.

The report therefore recommends that the government build on their Troubles Families programme by creating a new ‘Breaking Boundaries’ plan, based upon similar principles. This would be targeted at around a quarter of a million individuals who experience two or more of the following problems: homelessness, substance misuse and reoffending.

This would be funded by up to £100m a year for four years. This fund would be divided into two: two-thirds of the budget to local areas to introduce intensive one-to-one support for troubled individuals and to support local service integration and transformation and one third would be awarded to local authorities on a pay-for-performance basis (judged at area-level, rather than individual-level outcome indicators).

The programme would:

support upper-tier local authorities to integrate local services around the individuals who experience two of more problems of social exclusion
provide intensive support from a keyworker
be designed by upper-tier local authorities in partnership with specialist and voluntary sector organisations and those living facing multiple disadvantage, who have the strongest insights into what work
ensure locally pooled budgets matched funding from this programme
and mean that upper-tier local authorities should be able to bid for pots of relevant central funding (such as employment support, mental health and community safety funding) to be devolved.

Local government faces a tough settlement in the upcoming spending review. IPPR also releases separate figures today on the extent of cuts to local authorities over the next five years that show the current trajectory of local government cuts through to 2020 mean a spending cut on services by up to £5bn in real terms, if the government reduces grants to local government by the same amount as in the 2010 spending review.

This would mean that over the coming spending review period (2015/16 to 2019/20), we could see significant cuts to local government spending on specific services for vulnerable adults. Local government funded mental health provision for adults aged under-65 could be cut by 43%, while the Supporting People Programme for vulnerable people seeking independence in their own home could see cuts of 44%. This is compared to our estimate of a 2% cut to the relatively more protected social care budget as a whole. The report points out that these cuts are taking place while rough sleeping has increased by 55% in the UK over the past five years, over 13,000 households in England were accepted as homeless by their local council in the first quarter of 2015 and 20% of working-age adults without children are living in poverty.

Clare McNeil, IPPR Associate Director, said:

“Too much public spending on individuals experiencing problems such as addiction, homelessness, offending and poor mental health comes too late and doesn’t help people deal with the multiple problems they often face. At the next spending review, government must prioritise improving value for money for spending on this group. Our recommendations build on the example of the Troubled Families programme and introduce new long term reforms for local services to help the most excluded.”