Protecting vulnerable children and frontline services from cuts will need innovative partnering between councils and the voluntary sector.

The huge scale of the government’s Budget cuts represents a daunting challenge. Intense pressure on the poorest families, who according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies face cuts equivalent to 21.7 per cent of their household income, will force more children on to the streets, adding to the 100,000 children who already run away each year in the UK. But weaker frontline services will make safe places away from the streets even harder to find. The number of emergency beds in the UK for young runaways has already been cut from nine to just five after the London refuge for children closed earlier this year.

What is needed now is improved service integration at a local level, more for less budgets for local areas and the reprioritisation of scarce funding on prevention and early intervention. To make this happen, councils must work more closely with local partners to ensure frontline initiatives helping to keep young people out of care and preventing family breakdown and youth homelessness are protected.

Safe@last, a Railway Children-funded project based in South Yorkshire, now runs the only refuge for children in England and works in close partnership with the area’s four boroughs. Instead of each local authority paying an annual grant for the refuge, they are charged only when a young person from that borough actually uses the service.

The model is proven, innovative and cost-effective. If replicated nationwide, it would offer a preventative solution that reduces spending pressures by allowing professionals to intervene early and reach children at risk in time. Crucially, this also reduces the need for more intensive, specialist support in the long term.

Terina Keene is chief executive of Railway Children

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