By David Robinson
Politicians local and national will be making tough decisions in the months ahead. It would be easy to prioritise acute services and reduce investment in prevention. Easy but wrong.
For more than 30 years at Community Links we have been persuading policy makers, commissioners and independent funders to think about fences at the top of the cliff rather than ambulances at the bottom. It may seem a difficult argument in these straightened times but spending more now on, for instance, detached youth work with young people who aren’t a danger to themselves and others would be better by far than waiting for the really expensive problems to develop. There is scarcely any area of health care, education or social policy where prevention or early intervention doesn’t make best sense – socially and financially.
It is for this reason that Treasury Chief Secretary David Laws’ largely unreported answer to MP Graham Allen’s question on Wednesday was particularly significant. “Will the minister,” Allen asked, “seek to address some of the problems of the structural deficit by ensuring that we invest in babies, children and young people, so that they do not later require billions of pounds of remedial treatment for drug addiction, teenage pregnancy and a lack of aspiration in education and work, and so that we can build the type of society that most of us in the Chamber want to see?”
Laws replied, “The honourable gentleman is absolutely right. As we take tough decisions and come towards the spending review at the end of the year, we will have to try to maintain the services that we particularly value and that protect individuals in society who are on very low incomes. We need to protect investments that have the potential to pay off in the future, and I promise him that I will examine carefully the matters that he mentions”.
We do what we do because we believe that we all have an equal right to fulfil our potential. Some need help; advice, training or practical support. We haven’t hitherto framed it as a contribution to the structural deficit. Perhaps we should.