Recommendation 57

The Department must set out their response to the £2 billion expenditure proposed by The independent review of children’s social care, indicating how much additional funding they believe is necessary to ensure the care system is fit for purpose, how the additional funding would be deployed and the longer-term cost-benefit analysis. If Government sign off on the £2 billion funding injection, it must ensure this is ringfenced via a more intelligent funding formula that sets a minimum budget for local authority early intervention spending. In this way, additional funding would not be swallowed 52 Educational poverty: how children in residential care have been let down and what to do about it up by rising placement costs or expensive downstream social care interventions. This would rebalance the system to place greater weight on early intervention, rather than intervening at more costly crisis points downstream.