Report

A long road to recovery

This report from UK think tank PBE looks at local authority spending on early intervention children’s services 2010-11 to 2023-24.

Early intervention services play an important role in delivering positive outcomes for babies, children, young people and their families. Mainly funded and provided by councils in England, they cover a range of age and needs-based interventions, support and services.

Despite the clear importance of these services, our analysis shows that related spending has fallen by more than £2 billion in real terms since 2010/11, a decrease of 42%. Crucially, we find that these reductions have been highly uneven in their distribution. Spending per child has fallen by more than half (53%) in the most-deprived local authority areas, amounting to a reduction of more than half a billion pounds. Conversely, the least-deprived areas have reduced spending by less than one third (30%), equivalent to less than £200 million.