Has child neglect been ‘normalised’ in the UK?

The UK’s leading children’s charity is warning that child neglect could become a national crisis, fuelled by the cost of living crisis and cuts in support services.

The NSPCC wants a national neglect strategy amid fears that the failure to meet a child’s basic physical and psychological needs has become “normalised”.

Its survey of more than 500 frontline workers across police, health, education and social care found that:

83% believe there aren’t enough services to help children suffering neglect.

More than half say neglect has got worse during their career.

90% say the cost of living and poverty rates are driving cases of neglect.

And just 5% feel that appropriate action was taken after a referral was made.

We spoke to Josh MacAlister, who founded the social care charity Frontline and authored an independent review into children’s social care, published two years ago.

He’s now the Labour MP for Whitehaven and Workington.

We began by asking if he agrees that child neglect has been normalised.

Josh MacAlister: Yeah, I do think we’ve got a real problem, which is that levels of child neglect have risen through a number of factors including child poverty, which has been on the rise, but also society’s wider recognition of some of the things which previously we wouldn’t have called neglect that now are, has meant that we’ve got services that are seeing this neglect in its full colour. But we don’t have the services and the resources needed to respond to that neglect fully enough. It’s a tricky term and sometimes does get conflated with things like deprivation. It’s different, there is a distinction. But there’s also a relationship between those two things.

Cathy Newman: You authored this report, the independent report into child social care two years ago. How disappointed are you that more hasn’t changed? And what is your most pressing priority or most pressing ask, as it were, of the new government?

Josh MacAlister: My real disappointment is that we have many of the answers we need to dramatically improve the support that the most vulnerable children and families need. So we know what a lot of the answers are. They’re there, and we’re paying the price in late intervention for not getting it right early on and off. So the last government accepted many of the recommendations that I made, put some money into the system, some extra money. But we’re now facing higher bills to fix the system because we haven’t done enough. And what I’m saying is that we have a plan that’s there, that’s ready to go, that will shift the spending in the system and put it on a sustainable footing. And not only will it do that within the envelope of the cost of the service, but it will also improve life outcomes for children, which means that we’ll have a more productive and successful society and economy in the long run.

Cathy Newman: I wonder about the Chancellor’s commitment to this whole area, because she’s faced a lot of criticism about the two child benefit cap, and the government’s made it clear that is here to stay for the foreseeable future. Would you urge her to rethink that more urgently?

Josh MacAlister: I’d like us to get to the point where we have, a whole strategy, which includes looking at the benefits system so that we can maximise incomes for families where there are children living in poverty. There are lots of choices about that. So raising the two child limit would probably cost the same amount as the reform programme that I set out in my review, which would probably cost the same amount as reintroducing all of the sure start centres. So there’s big choices in politics, and I’m not pretending that they’re easy. But today’s report from NSPCC shows that if we don’t make some of these decisions, costs will rise and outcomes will continue to get worse.