Devon County Council’s projected 2024-25 Special Educational Needs & Disabilities (SEND) overspend has risen to £45.8 million, £14.7 million more than agreed with the government under the terms of the “safety valve” deal which is intended to reduce its ballooning SEND spending deficit to zero in the next few years.
The amount by which the council expects to miss the government-set 2024-25 overspend target, which was running at £7.4 million two months ago, has now doubled to £14.7 million at mid-year.
At the end of last year the county council expected its cumulative SEND spending deficit to reach £195 million by the end of 2024-25 before rising again to £207 million in 2025-26.
The “safety valve” deal, agreed earlier this year, requires it to rapidly reduce its deficit from the 2025-26 peak to zero by 2032.
However the £14.7 million by which it is currently exceeding its £31.2 million 2024-25 overspend target, added to the £195 million its cumulative deficit was expected to reach by the end of this financial year, means its deficit would reach £210 million this year and rise to £222 million in 2025-26.
Devon County Council cumulative SEND deficit 2019-20 to 2031-32 at March 2024 with 2024-25 £14.7 million mid-year excess overspend added. Year shown is financial year end e.g. 2020 = 2019-20. 2024-25 onwards are from Devon County Council projections.
The agreement with the government also requires the county council to break even on SEND spending by the end of 2025-26 and commits it to £50 million in budget cuts, the sale of £13 million of publicly-owned assets and the use of £20 million of its financial reserves.
In return the Department for Education said it would contribute a total of £95 million over nine years to 2032, the period covered by the deal.
At the same time the deal requires significant progress in improving Devon SEND services provision following numerous poor Ofsted and Care Quality Commission reports over the past six years.
When asked at a county council cabinet meeting in September what the consequences of breaching the terms of the deal would be, county finance director Angie Sinclair did not explain.
She did say that other councils have had similar deals suspended, but insisted that the county council was not in this position.
The government withheld £18 million from five local authorities, including Dorset County Council and Bath & North East Somerset Council, when their “safety valve” deals were suspended in March.
Larkbeare House in Topsham Road, one of several publicly-owned assets being sold to address county council budget shortfalls
Devon County Council is among several local authorities in England that are performing poorly on SEND provision.
In August this year, the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman said that the system set up to support children in England with SEND was in “utter disarray” and required a complete overhaul.
Last month, the government announced £1 billion of additional funding for SEND services nationally in its autumn budget. However at last week’s county council cabinet meeting Angie Sinclair said Devon’s share was not yet known.
She added that the 6% real-terms funding increase announced by the government would equate to around £7 million for Devon and would be on top of the money promised as part of the “safety valve” agreement.
But Lois Samuel, county council cabinet member for SEND services, said at a children’s scrutiny committee meeting the previous week that more than £5 million of additional SEND spending had taken place to clear around 340 Education, Health and Care Plan assessments – that provide the basis for statutory SEND support – from the county council backlog.
The number of young people in Devon with an Education, Health and Care Plan had grown to more than 9,500 by September, 764 more than last year. It is expected to reach 9,712 by January next year.
That is 340 more than the total on which the county council’s “safety valve” agreement is based.
Devon County Council SEND spending 2019-20 to 2024-25 at December 2023 with 2024-25 £14.7 million mid-year excess overspend added. Year shown is financial year end e.g. 2020 = 2019-20. 2023-24 onwards are from Devon County Council projections.
When the Devon County Council children’s scrutiny committee met on Monday 11 November it was supposed to discuss a report on the mid-year children’s services budget position.
However the report was not published until the preceding Thursday, in breach of the Local Government Act, which says council meeting agendas and “any background papers” must be published five clear days before meetings take place.
A second copy of the report has since been added to the meeting agenda which says it was published the preceding Tuesday, apparently in compliance with the law, although another report to the meeting which was also published after the deadline has not been similarly altered.
County councillor Alistair Dewhirst pointed out that despite the mid-year budget position report including a section headed “key budget issues”, it didn’t actually include any detail on the council’s financial position.
During the meeting county councillor Tracey Adams, the committee chair, also said it was a “concern” that there was no financial information included in the report.
Maria Price, county council democratic services director, said the information had not been “finalised” in time for the meeting. She added that the following week’s cabinet meeting “must” see the financial information first, and that “probably” the timing of the children’s scrutiny committee meeting was “not ideal”.
The report itself said: “The timing of scrutiny in relation to cabinet restricts the financial information that can be shared”, without explaining the reason for the restriction or the choice of meeting dates.
Alistair Dewhirst said that the meetings sequence was “ridiculous” and that it looked “as if the council is trying to obfuscate the whole issue and hide it under the carpet”.
County council chief executive Donna Manson, who had earlier said that there had been a “calendar issue”, nevertheless said that the council was not trying to avoid scrutiny of the issue.
Devon County Council Cabinet meeting on Wednesday 13 November 2024
The missing financial information appeared in a mid-year budget monitoring report to a meeting of the county council cabinet held on Wednesday 13 November.
This report was published on the Friday afternoon, three days before the children’s scrutiny committee met, complete with apparently “finalised” financial information.
It was also published in breach of the Local Government Act, less than five clear days before the cabinet meeting that discussed it took place.
The law says that local authority meetings may not consider agenda items in such circumstances, because they do not provide sufficient time for members of the public – and councillors – to inspect any related background papers before the meeting is held.
When the cabinet met the item was not only discussed as if nothing improper had occurred. It was accompanied by a 1,500 word report on the county council’s SEND overspend position, in the form of a presentation, which had not appeared on the agenda at all.
This should also have been published at least five clear days before the cabinet meeting took place, but it has still not appeared a week and a half later.
Unpublished county council cabinet 13 November 2024 SEND update presentation
At the meeting Julian Brazil said that the children’s scrutiny committee, of which he also is a member, had been “kept in the dark” about council progress against SEND delivery targets.
He said that the presentation was the first information he had seen about the “safety valve” deal and that it was going to be “almost impossible” for the county council to satisfy the terms of the agreement.
He added that the county council seemed to be “living in a parallel universe where [it] thinks everything is going to be fine, but no-one else does.”
Both he and county councillor Carol Whitton separately asked what the consequences of the county council failing to meet the terms of the deal would be.
Donna Manson replied that the deal the county council had agreed with the government was actually an “ongoing negotiation” and that the financial targets it contained were not exact but instead “not a finite figure”.
She added that the council “could seek clarity” in “further meetings with the Department for Education”.
She also said that the SEND improvement plan that was required as part of the deal was producing “positives”, including the clearance of a “significant” backlog of Education, Health and Care Plan assessments.
This stood at 653 assessments in September, after a 10% reduction in the number of overdue assessments during the preceding four months.
The county council says the backlog will be cleared completely by the end of the financial year.
Children’s scrutiny committee members have been seeking detailed information about implementation of what the county council calls its “SEND transformation programme” for over a year.
However a series of seven subcommittee meetings convened to examine the children’s budget had little more to say about SEND than the repetition of a budget report produced for a cabinet meeting held in September, if the published summary of the proceedings is anything to go by.
When the children’s scrutiny committee previously met in September, councillors commented on the lack of detail that was being provided and asked officers to include more information on the implementation of the programme in the following report, which is due in January next year.
However the meeting at which it is scheduled to appear will take place after the 2025-26 county council SEND services budget scrutiny meeting has already taken place.
Whether the timing of these two meetings also constitutes a “calendar issue” is not clear.
Meanwhile a National Audit Office report has found that national SEND spending has reached over £10 billion per year, a 58% real-terms increase over the past decade.
The report says that England’s SEND system is “still not delivering better outcomes for children and young people”, is “financially unsustainable and in urgent need of reform” and that the Department for Education’s “safety valve” programme is not going to produce a “sustainable system”.
