Margaret Hodge
Children's Fund (Somerset)
The Minister for Children (Margaret Hodge) : I congratulate the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) on securing the debate. I hope that I can give him the assurances that he seeks. I endorse what he said about the importance of the children's fund. It is one of the Government's exciting and successful innovations to invest in services for a group of children who often miss out: the five to 13-year old group.
We have developed services for under-fives, we do quite a lot to provide for children in their teenage years, but we often forget about services for the crucial five to 13-year-old group, at which the children's fund is directed. The fund has been successful in building lots of exciting projects that support children, most of them run by the voluntary sector. They provide key support for children before things go wrong. We provide preventative services that are crucial in ensuring that children can meet their potential and do not fall through the net into greater difficulties, increasing the demand on public services and damaging their life chances.
That process is important, and it is why we emphasised the shift to prevention in the Green Paper entitled "Every Child Matters". I see a future for children's fund activities within a world in which children's trusts, which we hope will be in place in most authorities by 2006–08, have the responsibility and funding to support such projects in every community, determined locally and meeting local needs, aspirations and priorities. That is how we anticipate that developing. The children's fund sets the tone and demonstrates the sort of policies that will work in the context of our new proposals for children's services.
I pay tribute to the Somerset children's fund. Barnardo's, which runs many of the children's fund partnerships for us throughout the country, is doing a very good job. A lot of good projects have begun in Somerset. The hon. Member for Somerton and Frome mentioned one or two. I have been told about a couple of programmes in Somerset, such as Somkids, which is a parenting course for families with children aged five to 13 who have early signs of emotional difficulties. The course helps parents to understand and to listen to their children. It will help children feel happier and more confident about themselves. Groups for children and young people run alongside the parenting groups.
The other scheme that was drawn to my attention and sounded very good was the Minehead middle school transition service, which supports children and parents through the transition from first schools to middle school, in years 4 and 5. There are two liaison workers, who spend every morning in first schools getting to know the pupils and supporting them in year 5, in September. That is a targeted service for those in the eight to 10-year-old group who are experiencing special educational needs or learning difficulties, who may be subject to bullying or antisocial behaviour or who may themselves have shown some criminal behaviour. Again, that is a good project.
I pay tribute to what is happening in Somerset around the particular needs of people such as traveller children, those from ethnic minorities, children living in temporary accommodation, children with learning and physical disabilities, those with hidden disabilities, children in rural isolation and refugee children. Those are all very good things, which we want to sustain.
I come to the issue that the hon. Gentleman raised about funding for his particular children's fund. He is right to say that there has been an impact in Somerset and Frome and in partnerships across country. I sincerely regret and recognise the problems that there have been in the funding of the children's fund and the uncertainties that that has caused in partnerships not just in Somerset but across the country. I sincerely apologise for those difficulties and I assure him, you, Mr. Amess and other hon. Members that we are working hard to get stability back into the programme, and to ensure that the budget is better identified and better managed from here onwards.
Let me explain why we have got ourselves into this situation. We embarked on the children's fund some three or four years ago. The funding is for very small voluntary organisation projects on the ground in every community. It took some time to get those projects off the ground. Therefore, in the early years of the children's fund, there was a considerable underspend. I am sure that you, Mr. Amess, will know that that has been drawn to the attention of hon. Members in the House every now and again.
To deal with that underspend, some sensible decisions were taken, as well as some perhaps less sensible ones. Sensible decisions were taken to top-slice some money for projects such as the summer play schemes for children in danger of getting involved in crime, or to fund some of the work that we are doing around information referral and tracking systems, which are part of the Green Paper proposals. Some money was used for contact centres for children who were not living with both their parents—their parents were separated or divorced. That was sensible. We never cut the money and it has not been used for other purposes. It was always used in the preventative area for the five to 13-year-old age group.
There were still fears that we would underspend the budget, so we gave allocations to partnerships that represented over-programming—15 per cent over-programming, more money than was available—and we allowed partnerships to carry forward underspends. The mix of allowing over-programming and carrying forward underspends led us into some of the financial difficulties. It meant that we were heading for an overspend—not that we were removing the funding that was available for these particular projects on the ground in local communities—and that we were in danger of spending more than the £450 million that we had been given by the Treasury towards children's fund activities. That is why we started looking at how we could cut spending plans to stay within the budget framework that we had been set by the Treasury.
Having taken those earlier decisions, however, I recognised that, for many partnerships, that change halfway through meant that projects that thought they had secure funding suddenly faced cuts. That is why I am pleased to confirm that we have found extra money for 2004–05, which will bring the allocation back to the £160 million that the partnerships were expecting. It will mean that, on our present plans, we will actually spend during the three-year period in excess of the £450 million that was allocated by the Treasury. With the additional £20 million, we will probably spend closer to £470 million.
We hope by the end of this week to give information to individual partnerships about how the additional national resources can be used locally. The Somerton and Frome partnership will then have a clearer indication of the resources available to it for 2004–05.
Mr. Heath : I am pleased with what the Minister is saying. Can she tell me whether any view has been taken on the spending profile that was urged on the partnerships by the Government? Will it be recognised in the allocation of additional funds? It seems critical that spending bulges are recognised.
Margaret Hodge : We recognise that problems may still exist for authorities that were in the so-called wave 3 programme, because of the way in which they profiled expenditure, with less spent in 2003–04, much more in 2004–05 and gradually declining amounts in 2005–06. It is to deal with such problems that we will set aside from the additional moneys a small contingency figure. It will be mainly but not solely available to authorities in the wave 3 programme that are facing particular problems. Again, we will make that clear to partnerships such as Somerton and Frome when we write to them at the end of this week.
The hon. Gentleman asked about 2005–06, which still leaves us with some difficulties. I want to approach that in a collaborative way with all the stakeholders: the large voluntary organisations, the many small voluntary organisations that have initiated good projects out of the funding and the local authorities and others who have an interest in the matter. I understand that everyone is keen to get some indication of the funding that will be available for 2005–06, so that they can start to plan effectively. Therefore, we have set a figure of £110 million for 2005–06, but I emphasise that final decisions will depend on the outcome of our discussions with partnerships and, of course, on the outcome of the spending review on which we are just embarking.
I hope that I have given some certainty to the hon. Gentleman and to people in his community who have been very distressed by the instability caused by decisions that were taken by the Department at an earlier stage. I leave him with this reassurance. The projects and programmes that have been initiated through the children's fund are vital. If we are to shift the emphasis of what we do from intervening when things go wrong in children's lives to preventing things from going wrong, these small, targeted, preventative programmes in local communities are utterly central. That is why I wish to engage in discussions and collaboration with the organisations on the ground and the partnerships to consider how we can best achieve stability in the next two or three years and how we can then sustain the effort and projects into the new world when children's trusts will drive children's services in every community.
