Cabinet Office wants joined-up approach to exclusion

21 Jun 07
The Cabinet Office is preparing a submission to the Comprehensive Spending Review that would require Whitehall departments to work together to tackle social exclusion, ministers revealed this week.

22 June 2007

The Cabinet Office is preparing a submission to the Comprehensive Spending Review that would require Whitehall departments to work together to tackle social exclusion, ministers revealed this week.

Cabinet Office minister Pat McFadden told Public Finance the intention was to create a set of new Public Service Agreements, applicable across government, that would target specific groups of people and try to get them into stable employment or housing.

'What we're trying to do is look at this from the point of view of the person that is experiencing the problem, rather than from the point of view of traditional departmental budget headings or indeed local authority departments,' McFadden said.

'It's not enough to have an accurate snapshot. Somebody's got to see the whole film, somebody's got to see the person's circumstances.'

McFadden was speaking at the June 18 launch of Reaching out: think family, a report from the Cabinet Office's Social Exclusion Task Force. This called for the integration that characterises the Every Child Matters programme to be extended to all services working with families at risk.

The report said a small minority – around 2% – of families experience multiple difficulties such as mental illness, learning disabilities and alcohol or drug abuse, problems that were often replicated in their children.

It urged service providers to start thinking about families in their entirety rather than regarding the problems of a parent or child in isolation. Final policy proposals will emerge in the autumn.

Social exclusion minister Hilary Armstrong said the general improvement in universal services was not reaching the most disadvantaged. 'If a family is suffering from a range of disadvantages then their ability to work their way out of that is limited. The next generation will reproduce the problems,' she said.

But Armstrong denied that, given the task force's emphasis on seamless family-focused services, splitting adult and child social care responsibilities had been a poor decision.

'It was the right thing to do,' she told PF. 'What children's services have done is put the focus on children.'

She added: 'Local authorities were finding ways to do that way before the government was legislating to do it. There was a real feeling that you had to look at children's services across the board because the most vulnerable children were dropping through the gaps.'

PFjun2007

Did you enjoy this article?

AddToAny

Top