You know you have grown up when you know the date of the budget, the Chancellor’s name and that of the Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Nowadays, I know all three!

The budget is of interest to me for two main reasons. Firstly, what will it do to help parents better afford childcare, and secondly would it do anything to help a social businesses like ours? Having trawled papers of all political persuasions, I found this budget has done at least something for parents, but nothing much for social businesses or charities.

Raising the tax free personal allowance to £9,205 next year is good for all staff working in Early Years, as this is historically a low paid sector, yet the drop in the higher rate tax from £42,475 to £41,450 will put many parents under even more pressure, with less again available for childcare.

Elsewhere I was pleased to see a fairer approach in the changes to child benefit.  I had already tweeted our disgruntlement about the initial unfairness of reducing it for families with one working parent, whilst allowing households with two working parents claim it even when their combined salaries exceeded the same limit. The new model seems fairer, although this first step towards producing a universal credit may be a retrograde one in the long term. Once a small snip makes it through, it will be easier for future Chancellors to trim away along the edge and soon the tablecloth has become a napkin.

I thought the Chancellor missed a trick by not improving working tax credits. It was a good move to exempt families with disabled children from changes here, but he could have done more to improve opportunities for all working parents – for instance letting them qualify for tax credits after 16 hours work. This would have meant fewer families would lose out when choosing to work part time, instead of being worse off than when they were on benefit.

Tax credits offer possibly the single greatest means to helping parents cope with the real cost of working when paying for childcare, and so much more could easily have been done here to make work pay.

The commitment to end child poverty by 2020 looks to be once again in jeopardy, especially if the Chancellor cuts £10bn from the welfare budget by 2016.  The promise to show us how our hard earned tax is used may be helpful here, so we can see exactly what the cuts will do to poorer families. Still, it remains grossly unfair that the poorest should bear the brunt of costs from the Government deficit.

Meanwhile, businesses were no doubt very pleased with the reduction in corporation tax, but sadly this makes no difference to social enterprises.  The Chancellor offered  no tax cuts for those of us in the social or charity worlds; nor did he improve access to social investment, which is key to helping grow and develop business in a way that has the potential to fundamentally change the way services are delivered to our communities. Access to social investment finance is the biggest barrier to business development in the social and charity sectors, but only the sixth barrier to ordinary businesses. Changes to the community investment tax could have made a massive difference here.

Finally, I do hope he keeps a lid on the reductions in UK planning laws. This country needs its green lungs.  We spend a lot of time finding ways to give children in our nurseries fresh air and space to be themselves, and it seems to be getting harder every day. Competing with cars and developers is no mean feat.  Allowing buildings on every site and squashing us all together will not be good for the aesthetic, physical or emotional well-being of anyone.

So what do we think of this budget?  A small glimmer of growth, whilst keeping a tight rein on the budget remains the watchword for households and businesses alike.

Either way, I know one nursery rhyme we might all be learning this week…

A dime and a dollar
Took me by the collar
And whispered this word in my ear:
“We must leave you to-morrow,
But prithee don’t sorrow,
We’ll come back to see you next year.

Leroy F. Jackson

I have learned that if I am to truly avoid all contact with the world of work, then I need to go abroad without a phone or internet access.  To this end, I recently spent a lovely few days immersed in the renaissance art of Florence.

On my return came the announcement that the Department of Education had allocated £60m of hard earned tax payers’ money to over 100 so-called voluntary and community organisations. The serenity of the Botticellis soon evaporated into a sort of Sir Henry Taylor level of gall and indignation – as his saying ‘where there are large powers with little ambition, nature may be said to have fallen short of her purposes’ came rapidly to mind.

Why was I feeling so cross? Principally because the purpose of the grants was to enable organisations to play a more significant role in reforming and delivering services for children, young people, parents and families – and with a particular emphasis on early intervention and tackling the needs of the most disadvantaged groups. What weasel words.  Is this not another way of wasting our time and effort, whilst looking at ways of cutting funds for children services.  Funding the usual suspects is hardly an innovative way forward.

Maybe I am being unfair, but in these difficult times – where organisations like mine are losing significant contracts to provide for children in need and run children centre services – it’s hard to stomach sums of over £100k plus being allocated to endless support organisations, many of which should be partnered up and formed into single entities.  According to the department, the aim of these grants is to free organisations up from dependency on grants… well there is little need to become sustainable if all the central costs are funded by tax payers.  What is the point of the Transition Funds? Was this not designed to support such organisations become sustainable? In my book, that’s £160m of money that could be better spent providing real services to children and their families.

I was also baffled and bemused by the other big decision (worth £1m over two years), which saw the strategic lead partnership for the early years and childcare sector allocated to a group of organisations, none of which are either specifically early years or childcare. I suppose what galled me more was how this would pay for at least 65 full daycare places with family support in my organisation for vulnerable children in high need. Instead, this is something we currently have to raise our own funds for, since such children not yet on the Child Protection list no longer constitute high priority. So much for applying the principles of early intervention…

The allocation of all this money is supposed to develop a vigorous and responsive sector, freed up from the dependency on grants and better equipped to operate within a payment by results environment; it is meant to make such organisations commissioning ready and look at innovative approaches to lever private investment. What strikes me is there is quite a tension and I will be intrigued to understand how organisations funded by the department can offer independence, challenge and innovation. Let’s only hope Jonathan Swift’s comment that ‘power is no blessing in itself, except when it is used to protect the innocent’ remains high in all our minds.

We are already halfway through January, having returned from a long break to the order and pattern that work gives us. We have cheerily greeted everyone with a Happy New Year, but will it be?

As an optimistic person, I try to see challenges as opportunities, although at times this takes a huge leap of imagination and positive energy.  This is especially true now, with the doom and gloom harbingers out in force.  Of course, the press itself is less than helpful, setting the seeds for dissatisfaction and disorder; but in doing so, the more important issues all too easily risk being crowded out by a sense of general dismay.

But where to begin?  Without a doubt, saving Children’s Centres… Already this month, I have received impassioned telephone calls and frustrated emails from people about their local authorities not only halving Children’s Centres, but with limited consultation and no apparent plan.

I visited a small Centre in West London myself this week, only to then hear they were to be closed.  This particular school-based site had the complete support of both parents and head-teacher, and the team itself was coherent and robust about the benefits to local families.  They were equally realistic about the need to shift some ways of working and extend their services out.  Cuts aside, I simply cannot believe that local authorities are unable to afford an investment of £100k per annum in their multi-million pound budget (surely little more than the salary for one over-inflated management post).

Elsewhere, I attended the inaugural Home Start Lecture, where Professor Michael Marmot spoke about health inequalities and the investment needed to secure a more Fair Society, Healthy Lives for children. I asked the panel’s designated Cabinet Minister, Francis Maude, why in the light of all the evidence for preventative and community based services, Children Centres were closing. He simply fudged the issue by reasserting the Government position, namely how they were champions of Children Centres, but it was down to local authorities to make the decisions.

I thought of a recent book I read called Nudge and wondered how we might get the Government to give a nudge.  It’s true, we don’t want another micro-managing government (our last experience of this was unhelpful enough), but now baby and bathwater come to mind. In the meantime, Children Centres are closing and the consequences will come back to haunt us.  Will we ever learn?

Our colleauges over at 4Children made a great start last year with their Shout Out campaign, but I personally believe the time has come for us to finally wake up and actually do something about this emerging catastrophe for children and families, especially across the capital. We need to mobilise ourselves and take action as a determined network of passionate and committed Children Centre professionals.

It’s true that some Children’s Centres are better than others and some will have to go.  But that doesn’t mean reduced budgets cannot be resolved in a way that is planned, purposeful and sensitive to local communities.  Slash and burn is too random (and lazy) an approach.  As the picture of cuts continues to take shape, it seems incumbent on us to hatch a much-needed plan for survival, sustainability and reshaping; and one finally based around an intergenerational model.  We need to snatch the Children’s Centre baton and lead the process ourselves.

The time for talk may well be over, but please do comment and tweet us!  This is more than a nudge; this is a call to arms.

Related Articles

• Children’s centres ‘under threat’ (bbc.co.uk)
• Sure Start good for families and for children’s health, say researchers (guardian.co.uk)
• Sure Start centres’ funding cut (bbc.co.uk)

So it finally happened.  And as predicted, the Comprehensive Spending Review proved little more than a combination of handy, bite-sized headlines with little meaning for us until next year’s allocated spend. The only winner in the end was the press, thanks to a ready set of horror stories, shock polls and human tragedy it will no doubt devour and reuse for the foreseeable future. Someone please save us all from the poorly analyzed reports which frustrate rather than inform, only serving to create more anxiety among the unfortunate, susceptible souls that we are.

In reality, we will not actually understand the true meaning of these cuts until early next year, when local authorities and other government and corporate contractors begin to prepare their own plans for 2011. So whilst we may be able to frame our own budget preparations within a 10 to 15% scale, we still have no real information about how the powerful budget holders will shape their real world requirements.

Until then, while all this ringing of hands is going on and people are pressed to respond and give their views, the banks are quietly preparing their bonuses and payouts and no one says a word. Have I missed something?