On Monday 20 October, Newcastle’s Labour Cabinet looked set to approve proposals to significantly reduce funding for post-16 SEND transport, only to U-turn at the last possible moment, for the second time. Initially presented in the paperwork as a financial necessity to cut, making savings within a £1.5mn budget, it was instead presented on the night as too vital a service to lose.
What has gone wrong, and what happens next?
Providing transport for young people with Special Educational Needs, and attending a specialist educational setting, is statutory duty local authorities are required to deliver up to the age of 16. It is a discretionary part of the offer for post-16 learners, but has historically been delivered by local authorities anyway, acknowledging that a young person’s transport needs do not disappear at an arbitrary point.
The Council’s proposals would have restricted the scope of support on offer, implemented stricter criteria for full eligibility, and required that students attend the closest available educational establishment offering their course, regardless of any other considerations. As would be expected, the Council’s own consultation captured the outrage and anguish felt by families who would have been affected. Some were rightly concerned that this would force some learners out of education prematurely.
The Council initially insisted that their hand was being forced, only to back pedal when the inevitable outcry became too loud to ignore. But with financial pressures continuing, will this be the end of the tale?
Choosing to act, or being forced to act?
No-one doubts that local authorities are under immense financial strain. Newly Reform-led councils across the country boldly declared last year that they would “eliminate waste and inefficiency”, only to find themselves ill-equipped for the task of actually governing. They are now implicitly laying the groundwork to cover for maximum council tax increases in March next year and blaming the government for it all.
Newcastle’s Labour-led Cabinet faces the same challenge. But a worrying pattern is now developing in the City of politically toxic proposals repeatedly being tabled and withdrawn. This damages public confidence, creates uncertainty, and fails to deliver a coherent vision that promotes financial sustainability in the long-term.
On the face of it, supporting more young people with Special Educational Needs to learn how to travel independently, as part of the proposals would have aimed to do, is transparently a Good Thing. We need to support independent living into adulthood and remove the cliff-edges of support that often exist at the post-16 and post-18 boundaries.
If these policy changes had been considered several years ago, without the increasing pressure of balancing the books weighing down on the City, then they could have reasonably been tackled in a user-centred way, with a greater degree of flexibility around criteria that meaningfully took into account personal circumstances. Improvements for young people could have come hand in hand with some measure of savings. Everybody wins.
Instead, the Administration was backed into a corner. The driver was to cut costs, not deliver better outcomes. That takes some options off the table, creates real pressure on families and students, and loses the opportunity to deliver beneficial outcomes for some of the most vulnerable members of our communities. Everybody loses.
A pattern emerges
This policy decision mirrors a similar move to take a swingeing axe to homelessness support funding back in 2024. Again, finances were the primary driver, not outcomes for service users, with the potential result a decimation of services widely regarded as being amongst the best in the country for tackling rough sleeping. The public was presented with a financial fait accompli that turned out to be nothing of the sort. Amid a public outcry, including some staunch criticism from me, the Council rowed back on the proposals and the original savings were not delivered.
The result of this flip-flopping is that the public will continue to worry that services are under threat of the financial axe, even if they are told otherwise, and will doubt any similar cases made in the future. Short-term savings will have to be identified. The opportunity for user-centred, long term transformation will be lost.
A better way forward
It is now clear that the Labour government has no interest in seriously resetting the financial position of local government. Financial pressures in social care, SEND, and basic, frontline services will remain. Reform’s fantasy of easy wins is illusory. We cannot wait for someone to come and solve these problems for us.
Instead, councils must start delivering user-centred transformation of key services urgently, now, delivering meaningful efficiencies before financial pressures force their hand. This approach has a double benefit: it delivers better policy outcomes for all concerned; and it saves money in the long-term, promoting sustainability and avoiding salami-slicing approaches that just whittle away what councils can do.
Within Special Educational Needs support, for example, one of the biggest financial pressures facing local authorities, we cannot wait for the Government to present their reforms. Instead, we need to start working with key partners, particularly academy trusts, to deliver collaborative efficiencies that enable better educational outcomes for pupils at a lower cost than the current model. That will require sharing resources, ending “us and them” approaches, and taking a long term view.
This approach takes time, hard work, boldness of vision and an entrepreneurial spirit. But I believe that with political will, it is possible. Some politicians in our region have become so used to begging bowl politics, hoping that Westminster will fix a broken system with big wads of cash the country seems not to have, that they have given up on being truly transformational. Others cannot, or do not want to, put in the hard work needed to sustain faith in the power of councils to support people to live their lives well.
For the sake of our residents, we cannot afford to be anything other than radical. The future of local government depends on it.
