Source · Select Committees · Education Committee
Recommendation 5
5
Accepted
Early intervention funding remains insufficient despite welcome grants, requiring urgent additional resources.
Conclusion
The Government’s focus on early intervention is the right one and long overdue. The additional £270 million provided through the Children’s Social Care Prevention Grant is welcome but falls far short of the £1.2 billion that has been removed from early intervention services since 2012, an even greater gap in the context of an increasing population. We welcome the additional funding provided through the Transformation Fund and look forward to seeing further details of the proportion of funding that will be allocated to early intervention programmes. It should be seen as a first step towards a wholesale rebalancing of the system towards early help and support for families, with an urgent need to identify further resources. (Conclusion, Paragraph 18)
Government Response Summary
The government details substantial new and continued funding commitments for prevention and early intervention, including a £300 million increase for the Families First Partnership Programme and a total £555 million investment, directly addressing the need for further resources. It also agrees on publishing data on early intervention spending.
Government Response
Accepted
HM Government
Accepted
This Government is committed to investment in prevention. We announced in the Spending Review that funding for the Families First Partnership Programme will be increased by £300 million over the next two years (2026–27 and 2027–28), as part of the £555 million investment in children’s social care from the Transformation Fund. We also confirmed that the £523 million invested in 2025–26 will continue in each year of the spending review period, until 2028–29. The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government will set out details on the distribution and further funding for the programme through the Local Government Finance Settlement later this year. On 8 August 2025 we announced an additional £18 million of investment in 2025–26 to support local authorities and Safeguarding Partners to implement the reforms. This is in addition to the £523 million invested in 2025–26 which doubled direct investment in preventative spend. Funding for the Families First Partnership Programme is issued through the Local Government Finance Settlement (LGFS) and is subject to grant conditions. These conditions ensure that funding is used specifically for the implementation and delivery of preventative services within the programme. The DfE is looking at improving the Section 251 financial spending data returns, which will give additional detail on the early intervention spending. The Government agrees that publishing data on the amount of children’s social care funding being spent on early intervention is important. DfE already publishes statistics on the percentage of local authority spending on children’s social care that does not go on Children Looked After (CLA). This provides data, at both an LA and England-wide level, on the proportion of funding spent on interventions that are designed to support children and families before a child needs to be taken into care, allowing us to compare funding levels for earlier-stage and later-stage interventions. This data can be found on our Children’s social care dashboard. The Deputy Prime Minister announced a plan on 3 July to move towards a new outcome-focused accountability model with a new Local Government Outcomes Framework. We are proposing to use this metric of non-CLA spending as one of the outputs in the Framework.