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Area-deprivation, social care spending and the rates of children in care proceedings in local authorities in England

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Stefanie Doebler highlights a strong positive relationship between socioeconomic area deprivation and high child care proceedings in England between 2015 and 2019.

Image courtesy of interviewee. February 21, 2024

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This video video is a transcript discussing a study on the rising rates of poverty and extreme deprivation in the UK, focusing on its impact on children and families. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation's recent findings reveal that approximately 3.8 million people, including one million children, experience destitution in the UK. The UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty has indicated that the government's inaction could breach international law.

The research, co-authored by scholars from Lancaster University, examines the rates of children entering compulsory care proceedings in deprived areas. Evidence shows that living in these areas significantly correlates with children being taken into care, with the risk of care proceedings being notably higher in the most deprived neighborhoods. The study utilized large-scale data linking children’s court cases with local authority deprivation and social care expenditure data.

Key findings indicate that over 90% of children in care proceedings are infants, with rates of care significantly higher in deprived areas compared to wealthier ones. For instance, children in the 10% most deprived areas are nearly 15 times more likely to enter care than those in affluent areas. The research highlights the importance of preventive services and funding, showing that additional social care spending can effectively decrease the incidence of children entering care.

However, deprived local authorities struggle to meet the increased demand for intervention amidst budget cuts and greater needs from other demographic groups. While preventive spending is critical, the direct effects of deprivation remain a significant barrier that needs addressing, requiring larger investments in combating poverty to support families and reduce the number of children entering care. The overall emphasis is on the necessity for the government to take serious action in alleviating deprivation to support local authorities and improve the circumstances for vulnerable families.

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The context, of this, study, is that,

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that we know that there has,

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has been quite a worrying increase in poverty

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and extreme deprivation in, some areas in the uk.

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Um, there's just a recent, just,

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earlier the last year, the Joseph Fr Foundation authored

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by Susan Fitzpatrick

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and others, have found an approximately three point,

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8 million, people, in experiencing,

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destitution extreme poverty, in the uk.

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And that includes, around 1 million children.

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And, just lost aut on the un special rapport,

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on extreme poverty and human rights.

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Olivia, the sch ter, I think he's pronounced,

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visited the UK and reported that poverty in,

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some areas in the UK is, so high that,

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the government's failure to act on, on this poverty,

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would constitute, breaking international law.

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And in this context, we are worried about the wellbeing

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of children and, the wellbeing of,

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of families in deprived areas.

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Um, and, so in my paper

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or in our papers, co-authored by, Karen Bhur RA

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and, Linda Cusworth at the Center for, child

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and Family Research at Lancaster University.

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And, we, basically dis discussed this context

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and focus on the rates of children,

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going into compulsory care proceedings

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that are taken away from their parents

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and going, potentially going into care,

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appearing in family courts.

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Um, there is a plethora of evidence on various,

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poor outcomes for families and children in deprived areas.

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Um, researched by David Tyler Robinson, Ben Barr,

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and Sophie Wickham, Davara Bennett,

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they found increased mortality rates in deprived areas.

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Um, famously in 2009, Kate Pickett

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and Richard Wilkinson in the spirit level found various,

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poor life force outcomes.

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For example, teenage pregnancies,

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increased rate drug misuse, and,

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and mental wellbeing issues and,

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and health issues in deprived areas.

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Um, there are also some, other teams

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of colleagues in my research area on child welfare

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inequalities, Paul Bay Waters, Callum.

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We, Dara Bennett

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and others who have been doing research on the associations

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between deprivation and the numbers of children in care now,

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we are all using various different data sources,

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and we kind of, ended up, producing similar findings

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with different data sources.

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So that, allows us to be quite confident

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that our findings are robust.

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Um, and we found strong associations,

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very strong associations between living in a deprived area

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and, the likelihood of children ending up in care.

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Um, we were also interested in the effect of authority

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because we know that over the last decade there have been

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cuts to local authority spending expenditure for,

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things like libraries,

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but also pr broadly preventative support.

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Um, and preventative support could be something like a

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library where people can read, people can enjoy themselves,

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or a youth club or, a a child,

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mother child family center

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where people can go and get some support.

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And there have been cuts to all sorts of services.

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So, local authorities have been stripped down

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and are kind of scrambling to, to cater the increased need

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of children needing intervention.

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And we were interested in prevention.

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How does prevention matter?

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Because, obviously if we arrive at the point

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where we need intervention, it's already too late,

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we're already, there's already harm happening.

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Um, so, what we did,

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was we used large scale, data,

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a large scale data linkage study,

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that is representative, of, the, the,

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local authorities in the uk, in, in, in England,

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I should say in England.

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Um, and, the data consists of,

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data from the children and family court advisory

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and support service, CAFCA England, on,

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the, well on, children

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in, those are case, data cases of children

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in court cases, compulsory care proceedings,

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they're called section 31 care proceedings.

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Um, and those child cases we linked

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to local authority data on deprivation.

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So the Ministry for Housing communities

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and local government has released

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or regularly releases data on area deprivations, employment,

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income deprivation, housing deprivation, and so on.

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Um, and we linked that, to deprivation data

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and to data from the Ministry of Housing Communities

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and local government on, the local authorities' budgets.

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It section 251 data on, local authorities budget

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and spending on various, types of expenditure on.

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And, some of those variables measure broadly measure,

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preventative services.

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Um, so our data set consists

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of 117,098 cases involving children in the

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section 31 care proceedings,

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but we've then aggregated the data.

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So we basically have, end up with a 3,775

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child cases in 151 local authorities,

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and per five years of data.

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And then we split them up into age groups

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and basically looked at infants children were, who were one

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to four years old, five to nine years old, and so on,

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and then the 16 to 17 year olds.

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So we grouped the data by age,

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because we were interested in the difference,

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is it affecting younger children more than older children?

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And we did find that.

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Um, but we, we get to the findings maybe in a minute.

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Um, and we carried out, various, statistics.

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So we looked at descriptive statistics of local authorities.

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Um, so we've got two units of analysis.

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The first unit of analysis is the 100,

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50 local authorities, 151 local authorities.

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And for that, we looked at the numbers of children

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who do end up in cappa 10,000 of the population.

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Um, and we, for our modeling, for our statistical modeling,

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our unit of analysis is the aggregate child case

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observation per year and per the 151 local authorities.

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Um, and we carried out, structural equation model.

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Um, now structural equation model is a type of regression.

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It's a type of, it's a broad family of models that model,

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relationship between theorized latent variables.

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So those are theory concept that we can't,

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observe in the real world.

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So we need to find measures

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to operationalize those theories.

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For example, deprivation, area deprivation is,

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is such a concept where we need

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to find some way of measuring it.

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And, for that, we then used, the five domains

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of the, IMD, the English index of multiple deprivation,

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which is employment income deprivation,

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health deprivation, crime deprivation.

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So we, and we basically fitted a model

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where we disentangle these different domains of deprivation

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because they might contribute

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differently to the rates of children.

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Okay? It might be areas that are more mental health deprived

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rather than just income.

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Um, and we then looked at association

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between those deprivation domains

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and social care expenditure, so different kinds

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of social care spending,

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and we're interested in the joint effect of,

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both on our outcome variable, which is the rates of children

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that are going through those compulsory care proceedings

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and appear in the, in the English family courts.

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Um, so we were interested in that mediated moderated effect,

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so the interplay between deprivation and expenditure.

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But we were also, of course, interested in the known

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direct effect of deprivation on, the numbers

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or rates of children ending up in care,

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which we already know from other research exists.

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So we try to get at, contribute to the field

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by getting at that, mechanism that may be happening

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between, deprivation and spending.

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The vast majority, over 90% of children in compulsory care,

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pro proceedings in English family courts are infants.

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They're babies that are younger than 1-year-old.

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So that's quite dramatic.

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Um, and we know this from previous work by Karen Hurs,

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BA ra, and,

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and colleagues, at the Nuffield family,

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justice Observatory.

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Um, so there has been other research,

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but we, replicated that finding.

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And we found, for example,

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that the incidence rates per 10,000 of the,

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child population of local authorities is,

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almost a hundred per, per 10,000 for infants,

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but it is only two 20, well, only

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but it is 22 for one to four year olds

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and five for the 16 years.

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So there is a, is is quite a large difference by age.

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So the vast majority are babies.

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Um, and we found strong relationships,

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between area deprivations

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and the rates of children, entering those compulsory,

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care proceedings, whether is a question being made,

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whether they have to be taken away from their families.

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Um, and, we found that the incidence rate

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of children in care proceedings is 2.5 times higher in the

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25% most,

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deprived than the 25% least deprived areas.

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Um, and if we look at the 10% most, deprived areas,

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then we find that children living in those,

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very deprived neighborhoods are almost 15 times more likely

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than children in wealthy areas to, have to go

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through those care proceedings

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and potentially being taken into care.

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So those are very stark differences,

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and they're very worrying.

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We also found complex associations between the social care

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spending of local authorities, and deprivation

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and the numbers of children moving into care.

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Um, so we found that all forms of local authorities, social,

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child social care expenditure,

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do show significant associations with the rates

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of children in care proceedings,

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preventative spending in particular.

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So preventative spending, on youth support

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and what used to be short start centers on, on,

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on mother family centers

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and so on, are significantly negatively related

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to the rates of children going in care in

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those local authorities.

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So there is a preventative success

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of having those services there.

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Um, for example, just to kind of visualize it a bit,

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a 1000 pound increase in social care spend per child in a

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given year and local authority is associated

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with a 12% decrease in the child incidence rate,

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theoretically going into care.

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So this is based on a model estimation,

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but in theory, you would,

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you could expect a 12% decrease, and that's a lot.

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So it, that does have a really strong protective effect.

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Um, however, there is an interplay with,

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with deprivation

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because we know that the most deprived areas have been,

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stripped off budgets.

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So they, they, they are left with a lot less,

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money to spend.

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So local authorities often scramble, they have to cater

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to the increased need for intervention.

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So there's not so much left for other, other things.

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They also have to cater to, to an aging population.

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They have to spend on roads on and, and services.

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Um, and, we found a one standard deviation increase,

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or, or, or basically a one unit increase in our

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standardized deprivation measure is associated

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with a 540 pound increase in spend per child in the,

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in the more deprived area.

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So they do spend more on, social services, but and,

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and on prevention if they can.

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So they do spend more,

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but, it would only reduce the incident rate by 6%

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because the direct effect of deprivation is

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so strong in those areas.

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So they're basically battling the strong direct effect.

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They, would need a lot more funding for prevention, yes,

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but they also would need a lot more funding

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to really ameliorate the direct deprivation

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that is affecting families.

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Because if we tackle deprivation, if we tackle,

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poverty in areas that will, that will, show results

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that will clearly, have an effect on, on the numbers

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of children that can stay within their families.

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Now, one caveat is we need

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to be careful when we talk about deprivation

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and poverty, not to mix, levels up.

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So not to mix up the individual level with aggregate level.

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Um, so there is individual level poverty and households,

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but our paper is looking at the aggregate level deprivation,

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of, local authorities, which is a context effect.

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So it's the context those children live in.

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So there may be families who are not deprived themselves,

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but they live in very deprived neighborhoods.

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And just living in those deprived neighborhoods,

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even if I'm not deprived myself,

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already has a negative effect in itself.

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What I also wanted to highlight is

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that there is this strong direct effect of deprivation,

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and that really far outweighs, the relief

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that is achieved by increased social care spending.

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So it is very important to spend more on social care, but

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because the direct effect of deprivation is so strong,

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to today in, in, in today's world, we really need

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to tackle deprivation.

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We do see, deprived,

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local authorities, firefighting.

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We see them scrambling to address an urgent need

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for intervention, for intervention, for,

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for intervention, that, protect children.

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And we see an increased need for preventative services.

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We see the effects of austerity,

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basically leaving local authorities with very little left

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to spend, especially in the north of England,

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especially in the, in the, northeast of England.

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So there are local authorities that are,

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really very deprived

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and have high rates of children in care.

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Um, and, we, we, we,

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we can see them basically on, on the map.

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Um, and those authorities need help.

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They need more investment in a prevention,

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they need bigger budgets,

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but they also need more investment into directly tackling,

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de tackling deprivation,

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because it's not just spending for intervention spending

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for preventative tailored services for children.

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That's great. We need that,

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but we also need other services

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that help fa families out of poverty.

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So if the, so-called leveling up agenda,

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of the government is to be taken seriously.

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There needs to be put a lot of,

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a lot more money be put into that,

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really leveling up those areas, creating,

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sustainable employment,

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creating educational opportunities for those

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who are left out because

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there's a lot of children in schools.

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They're not, I wouldn't say they're left behind.

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They're left out thereby default, left out

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because the, the life circumstances that's created

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for these children, are so dire.

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So we really need to do a lot more to help,

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local authorities.

00:00 - The context, of this, study, is that, that we know that there has, has been quite a worrying increase in poverty and extreme deprivation in, some areas in the uk. there's just a recent, just, earlier the last year, the Joseph Fr Foundation authored

00:17 - by Susan Fitzpatrick and others, have found an approximately three point, 8 million, people, in experiencing, destitution extreme poverty, in the uk. And that includes, around 1 million children. And, just lost aut on the un special rapport, on extreme poverty and human rights. Olivia, the sch ter, I think he's pronounced, visited the UK and reported that poverty in, some areas in the UK is, so high that,

00:48 - the government's failure to act on, on this poverty, would constitute, breaking international law. And in this context, we are worried about the wellbeing of children and, the wellbeing of, of families in deprived areas. and, so in my paper or in our papers, co-authored by, Karen Bhur RA and, Linda Cusworth at the Center for, child and Family Research at Lancaster University. And, we, basically dis discussed this context

01:21 - and focus on the rates of children, going into compulsory care proceedings that are taken away from their parents and going, potentially going into care, appearing in family courts. there is a plethora of evidence on various, poor outcomes for families and children in deprived areas. researched by David Tyler Robinson, Ben Barr, and Sophie Wickham, Davara Bennett, they found increased mortality rates in deprived areas.

01:51 - famously in 2009, Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson in the spirit level found various, poor life force outcomes. For example, teenage pregnancies, increased rate drug misuse, and, and mental wellbeing issues and, and health issues in deprived areas. there are also some, other teams of colleagues in my research area on child welfare inequalities, Paul Bay Waters, Callum.

02:18 - We, Dara Bennett and others who have been doing research on the associations between deprivation and the numbers of children in care now, we are all using various different data sources, and we kind of, ended up, producing similar findings with different data sources. So that, allows us to be quite confident that our findings are robust. and we found strong associations, very strong associations between living in a deprived area

02:45 - and, the likelihood of children ending up in care. we were also interested in the effect of authority because we know that over the last decade there have been cuts to local authority spending expenditure for, things like libraries, but also pr broadly preventative support. and preventative support could be something like a library where people can read, people can enjoy themselves, or a youth club or, a a child, mother child family center

03:16 - where people can go and get some support. And there have been cuts to all sorts of services. So, local authorities have been stripped down and are kind of scrambling to, to cater the increased need of children needing intervention. And we were interested in prevention. How does prevention matter? Because, obviously if we arrive at the point where we need intervention, it's already too late, we're already, there's already harm happening.

03:43 - so, what we did, was we used large scale, data, a large scale data linkage study, that is representative, of, the, the, local authorities in the uk, in, in, in England, I should say in England. and, the data consists of, data from the children and family court advisory and support service, CAFCA England, on, the, well on, children

04:18 - in, those are case, data cases of children in court cases, compulsory care proceedings, they're called section 31 care proceedings. and those child cases we linked to local authority data on deprivation. So the Ministry for Housing communities and local government has released or regularly releases data on area deprivations, employment, income deprivation, housing deprivation, and so on. and we linked that, to deprivation data

04:49 - and to data from the Ministry of Housing Communities and local government on, the local authorities' budgets. It section 251 data on, local authorities budget and spending on various, types of expenditure on. And, some of those variables measure broadly measure, preventative services. so our data set consists of 117,098 cases involving children in the section 31 care proceedings, but we've then aggregated the data.

05:22 - So we basically have, end up with a 3,775 child cases in 151 local authorities, and per five years of data. And then we split them up into age groups and basically looked at infants children were, who were one to four years old, five to nine years old, and so on, and then the 16 to 17 year olds. So we grouped the data by age, because we were interested in the difference, is it affecting younger children more than older children?

05:54 - And we did find that. but we, we get to the findings maybe in a minute. and we carried out, various, statistics. So we looked at descriptive statistics of local authorities. so we've got two units of analysis. The first unit of analysis is the 100, 50 local authorities, 151 local authorities. And for that, we looked at the numbers of children who do end up in cappa 10,000 of the population. and we, for our modeling, for our statistical modeling,

06:27 - our unit of analysis is the aggregate child case observation per year and per the 151 local authorities. and we carried out, structural equation model. now structural equation model is a type of regression. It's a type of, it's a broad family of models that model, relationship between theorized latent variables. So those are theory concept that we can't, observe in the real world. So we need to find measures to operationalize those theories.

06:58 - For example, deprivation, area deprivation is, is such a concept where we need to find some way of measuring it. And, for that, we then used, the five domains of the, IMD, the English index of multiple deprivation, which is employment income deprivation, health deprivation, crime deprivation. So we, and we basically fitted a model where we disentangle these different domains of deprivation because they might contribute

07:25 - differently to the rates of children. Okay? It might be areas that are more mental health deprived rather than just income. and we then looked at association between those deprivation domains and social care expenditure, so different kinds of social care spending, and we're interested in the joint effect of, both on our outcome variable, which is the rates of children that are going through those compulsory care proceedings

07:52 - and appear in the, in the English family courts. so we were interested in that mediated moderated effect, so the interplay between deprivation and expenditure. But we were also, of course, interested in the known direct effect of deprivation on, the numbers or rates of children ending up in care, which we already know from other research exists. So we try to get at, contribute to the field by getting at that, mechanism that may be happening between, deprivation and spending.

08:26 - The vast majority, over 90% of children in compulsory care, pro proceedings in English family courts are infants. They're babies that are younger than 1-year-old. So that's quite dramatic. and we know this from previous work by Karen Hurs, BA ra, and, and colleagues, at the Nuffield family, justice Observatory. so there has been other research, but we, replicated that finding.

08:52 - And we found, for example, that the incidence rates per 10,000 of the, child population of local authorities is, almost a hundred per, per 10,000 for infants, but it is only two 20, well, only but it is 22 for one to four year olds and five for the 16 years. So there is a, is is quite a large difference by age. So the vast majority are babies. and we found strong relationships,

09:21 - between area deprivations and the rates of children, entering those compulsory, care proceedings, whether is a question being made, whether they have to be taken away from their families. and, we found that the incidence rate of children in care proceedings is 2.5 times higher in the 25% most, deprived than the 25% least deprived areas. and if we look at the 10% most, deprived areas, then we find that children living in those,

09:52 - very deprived neighborhoods are almost 15 times more likely than children in wealthy areas to, have to go through those care proceedings and potentially being taken into care. So those are very stark differences, and they're very worrying. We also found complex associations between the social care spending of local authorities, and deprivation and the numbers of children moving into care. so we found that all forms of local authorities, social,

10:21 - child social care expenditure, do show significant associations with the rates of children in care proceedings, preventative spending in particular. So preventative spending, on youth support and what used to be short start centers on, on, on mother family centers and so on, are significantly negatively related to the rates of children going in care in those local authorities.

10:46 - So there is a preventative success of having those services there. for example, just to kind of visualize it a bit, a 1000 pound increase in social care spend per child in a given year and local authority is associated with a 12% decrease in the child incidence rate, theoretically going into care. So this is based on a model estimation, but in theory, you would, you could expect a 12% decrease, and that's a lot.

11:13 - So it, that does have a really strong protective effect. however, there is an interplay with, with deprivation because we know that the most deprived areas have been, stripped off budgets. So they, they, they are left with a lot less, money to spend. So local authorities often scramble, they have to cater to the increased need for intervention. So there's not so much left for other, other things.

11:39 - They also have to cater to, to an aging population. They have to spend on roads on and, and services. and, we found a one standard deviation increase, or, or, or basically a one unit increase in our standardized deprivation measure is associated with a 540 pound increase in spend per child in the, in the more deprived area. So they do spend more on, social services, but and, and on prevention if they can. So they do spend more,

12:08 - but, it would only reduce the incident rate by 6% because the direct effect of deprivation is so strong in those areas. So they're basically battling the strong direct effect. They, would need a lot more funding for prevention, yes, but they also would need a lot more funding to really ameliorate the direct deprivation that is affecting families. Because if we tackle deprivation, if we tackle, poverty in areas that will, that will, show results

12:37 - that will clearly, have an effect on, on the numbers of children that can stay within their families. Now, one caveat is we need to be careful when we talk about deprivation and poverty, not to mix, levels up. So not to mix up the individual level with aggregate level. so there is individual level poverty and households, but our paper is looking at the aggregate level deprivation, of, local authorities, which is a context effect. So it's the context those children live in.

13:07 - So there may be families who are not deprived themselves, but they live in very deprived neighborhoods. And just living in those deprived neighborhoods, even if I'm not deprived myself, already has a negative effect in itself. What I also wanted to highlight is that there is this strong direct effect of deprivation, and that really far outweighs, the relief that is achieved by increased social care spending. So it is very important to spend more on social care, but

13:34 - because the direct effect of deprivation is so strong, to today in, in, in today's world, we really need to tackle deprivation. We do see, deprived, local authorities, firefighting. We see them scrambling to address an urgent need for intervention, for intervention, for, for intervention, that, protect children. And we see an increased need for preventative services. We see the effects of austerity,

14:02 - basically leaving local authorities with very little left to spend, especially in the north of England, especially in the, in the, northeast of England. So there are local authorities that are, really very deprived and have high rates of children in care. and, we, we, we, we can see them basically on, on the map. and those authorities need help. They need more investment in a prevention,

14:26 - they need bigger budgets, but they also need more investment into directly tackling, de tackling deprivation, because it's not just spending for intervention spending for preventative tailored services for children. That's great. We need that, but we also need other services that help fa families out of poverty. So if the, so-called leveling up agenda, of the government is to be taken seriously.

14:51 - There needs to be put a lot of, a lot more money be put into that, really leveling up those areas, creating, sustainable employment, creating educational opportunities for those who are left out because there's a lot of children in schools. They're not, I wouldn't say they're left behind. They're left out thereby default, left out because the, the life circumstances that's created

15:14 - for these children, are so dire. So we really need to do a lot more to help, local authorities.

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