Agenda item

The Executive Member for Children’s Services submitted a report for Executive’s consideration.

The report sought approval of a new three-year partnership with SHiFT, a youth justice charity, that would create a new SHiFT Practice hosted by Children’s Services within the Council. The Practice would work intensively across two, 18-month Programmes with children and young people caught up in, or at highest risk of, cycles of crime and exploitation. The costs of the partnership were supported by the sum of £600,000 which SHiFT has secured from the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities, alongside the match funding of £556,347 investment from the Council.

The report described that despite the best efforts of dedicated professionals, many young people and their families did not get the support they needed to move to a place of safety and strength. Too often, current responses to harm and offending exacerbated crisis, compounded disadvantage, and deepened harmful cycles. Services and systems were experienced as piecemeal and uncoordinated, with artificial thresholds that created damaging cracks, gaps, and cliff edges. The system had been designed through the lens of disconnected problems rather than the interconnected needs of people and their communities.

ORDERED that Executive:

1.    Approve the partnership with SHiFT and the opportunity this presented to offer intensive multidisciplinary support for the most vulnerable children caught in cycles of crime and exploitation in the area.

2.    Authorise receipt of grant funding to the Council from SHiFT sourced from the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities totalling £600,000 over three years. Funding would be received on signature of a Partnership Agreement with SHiFT, the timeline for which was March/April 2024.

3.    Approve match investment from the Council to enable the creation of the new SHiFT Practice totalling £556,347 over three years. This would be an approval in principle for inclusion in the 2024/25 to 2026/27 MTFP and to be funded as a transformation initiative from Flexible Use of Capital Receipts. The initiative will be included in the Flexible Use of Capital Receipts strategy which would be tabled for Council approval in February 2024.

OPTIONS

As there were no other organisations which created partnerships with Local Authorities in the way envisaged, with grant funding available through the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities no other options were put forward as part of the report.

REASONS

SHiFT was an innovative organisation, founded in 2019, with a track record for delivering exceptional outcomes that broke the destructive cycle of children caught up in, or at risk of, crime. The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities supported and funded the national scale and spread of SHiFT. The Department brokered an introduction between SHiFT and Middlesbrough Council. The Department was keen for the area to receive support and funding from SHiFT to bolster efforts to improve outcomes for the area’s children and young people, noting local challenges relating to Serious Youth Violence and the number and experiences of children in Local Authority care.

SHiFT would offer 18 months of 1-1 intensive support for the 54 most vulnerable children and young people in Middlesbrough (up to the age of 25) over three years. The total cost of the partnership was £1.156m over three years. £600,000 of the sum needed would be provided by SHiFT with a match investment of £556,347 over the same period from the Council. Investment required from the Council amounted to approximately £11,000 per child for an 18-month Programme. This represented good value for money given the highly complex needs of this vulnerable group and the intensity and expertise of the work SHiFT would deliver. The current practitioners would be able to transfer the complex cases to SHiFT workers, providing them with greater capacity to work with more children and young people, and SHiFT support would be delivered at much lower cost to the Council because employment of SHiFT staff was substantially subsidised by grant funding.  Further, SHiFT had an evidenced track record for delivering exceptional outcomes and in year cost savings and cost avoidance through, for example, reducing reliance on high-cost placements, avoiding children being remanded in custody, and supporting children to return to mainstream education from alternative provision. Specific targets for cost savings would be set with SHiFT and monitored on a quarterly basis through shared governance once the children for SHiFT support have been identified.

Estimated cost savings based on changes SHiFT had brought about elsewhere for each 18-month SHiFT Programme working with 27 children which were detailed in the table on page three of the report.