Next Gen News

Compulsory retirement at 65 to be phased out, more on the Khyra Ishaq case; and an argument for timely intervention

Today's top Society Guardian news and comment

Inquiry calls for closure of children's heart surgery unit

Compulsory retirement at 65 to be phased out

Tell people they are fat, not obese, says minister

Unions condemn a contract with a temporary NHS Trust Chief '

Home secretary kills off asbos

Datablog: Asbos - who issued them, and how many

Dorothy Rowe: the mental health diagnostic manual is a mythology

All of today 's Society Guardian stories

More information about the case Khyra Ishaq

Deborah Orr: Khyra's father has lessons to learn too

Comment is free: home education is precious, not dangerous

All Society Guardian child protection stories

Other news

•There is little evidence that public services commissioned from voluntary sector organisations are better for service users, says a research study reported in Third Sector.

• Local authority pensions may be unaffordable in the long term and councils should consider whether benefits should be cut, and employee contributions raised, says an Audit Commission paper.

Timely intervention

How do we refocus policy and resources on supporting severely disadvantaged children in their crucial early years, rather than intervening later to pick up the pieces once their lives have gone off the rails?

It's to be welcomed that Labour MP Graham Allen MP is to chair a government inquiry into just that. Allen, who will head the independent commission into early intervention has long been a champion of this cause and for some time has operated an informal alliance with the work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith on the issue.

High on the commission's agenda is the identification of successful early early intervention models. This is the easier bit: Labour, which introduced Sure Start, made various attempts to develop the idea. Evidence already exists about useful projects, from Nurse Family Partnerships to The Incredible Years.

The harder part is to find ways of funding these interventions. The Treasury never liked "investing to save" even when it had money to spare, while the recent axing of local authority grants has impacted harshly on early intervention projects already up and running. A further complication is the way the post-Baby P crisis has forced local authority children's services to divert cash earmarked for early intervention family projects into over-stretched child protection services.

The funding aspect of the commission will not report until May 2011. That's well beyond the critical autumn public spending review, and some time after local authorities have agreed their (much reduced) 2011-12 budgets. Spare public money for long term investments will be, one suspects, non-existent. So it is instructive that Allen's brief is to consider the scope for developing private funding streams.

Allen published an article making the case for private social investment in the Financial Times this week (co-authored, interestingly, with Jim O'Neill, Goldman Sachs' chief economist). They acknowledge that this sort of funding has already started to emerge, in a marginal way, in the form of Social Impact Bonds. If this pot is to expand, they argue, new financial instruments need to be developed and strict Treasury rules on financial risk need to be relaxed. They write:

"If this is possible, the prize is great: bringing government guidance, private funding and third-sector drive together to reduce demand for state services in the future."

Allen is right to warn of the need for political consensus: for all that it has the potential to act as trigger for social innovation there will be intense suspicion that social investment is a ruse to further privatise the welfare state and make profits out of the misery of the least well off. Nor is it clear whether there is much appetite for it among private or corporate investors. But this is welfare in the age of austerity: by this time next year City cash may well be the only game in town.

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