Bid to secure an extra £1 million to help Cornwall's vulnerable children denied
An alternative budget plan aimed at protecting services has been denied
A bid to secure an additional £1million to help the most vulnerable children in Cornwall has been blocked by Conservative councillors.
Jayne Kirkham, leader of the Labour group at Cornwall Council, had put forward an alternative budget plan to the meeting of full council on Tuesday.
This aimed to protect services which help children with complex needs and their families and was also designed to help save the council money.
However Cllr Kirkham’s proposals were dismissed by the Conservative administration, with one councillor comparing her request to a child selecting Christmas presents from an Argos catalogue.
Cllr Kirkham had proposed that the council should reverse a planned saving of £700,000 which was to scale back planned investment in the council’s positive behaviour support team.
In the council's budget papers it was explained that this move would lead to reductions in full time members of staff and that there "are risks with these proposed reductions".
'It will prevent children having to go into care placements'
Cllr Kirkham stated in her proposal: "The reason for reversing this cut is that the Positive Behaviour Management team will support the care of the most complex young people in the community, including outreach work out of hours. It will provide the back-up, training and stability needed to prevent these children having to leave their home environments to enter the most high-intensity care placements, which is damaging and disruptive for the children and costs the council between £10 ,000- £20,000 per week.
"This is proposed as an ‘invest to save’ measure. High intensity care placements cost a minimum of £500,000 per year. The Positive Behaviour Management team would only need to save 1.4 children going into these most expensive placements per year to pay for themselves. This is a very realistic prospect and the team would hope to prevent this number of placements as an absolute minimum".
Cllr Kirkham said that the move could be funded by taking money from a place and green growth reserve fund for the first three years but after that the service could be self-financing due to the money that would be saved on not having to pay for expensive placements.
The Labour councillor also proposed that the council provide £300,000 funding to help continue the Head Start programme which helps improve emotional and mental health outcomes for children and young people.
Funding for the programme is currently provided by the National Lottery but this is due to end in 2022 and Cllr Kirkham proposed that the council should continue to provide funding with money from the public health budget.
Her proposals were seconded by Laurie Magowan who said that they would help to protect the most vulnerable children and families in Cornwall.
'It's like a child picking Christmas presents from a catalogue'
However the proposals were dismissed by Conservative councillor Louis Gardner who compared it to "my little six-year-old two days before Christmas looking at the Argos catalogue looking for what she wants without knowing how much Mummy and Daddy have to spend". He said that he could not support "pinching reserves".
Cllr Kirkham responded to the comment saying that she had drawn up the proposals with advice from the council’s children’s services staff and said: "I don’t think they would appreciate their services being described as a toy in the Argos catalogue".
Barbara Ellenbroek, Cabinet member for children’s services, said that there was no cut in services "as it is not a service being delivered at the moment".
She admitted that a positive behaviour support team could provide better outcomes but said there was no budget available for such work.
The Tory councillor said that other areas have such services funded by NHS clinical commissioning groups and said that she was having discussions with NHS Kernow to see if they could work with them to do that.
And she said that with Cornwall being named as an Education Investment Area by the government there might be funding available through that.
However, Cllr Kirkham said that while there might be alternative funding it would take time to get that in place during which time the service would be lost.
The alternative budget proposal was lost when put to the vote with 31 in favour and 47 against.
More information about the approved budget can be found on Cornwall Council's website.