England’s children’s commissioner is urging the government to establish an emergency fund for areas where children face poor outcomes, after a review found wide gaps in services and access across the country.
Dame Rachel de Souza, Children’s Commissioner for England, made the call Monday with the publication of The Childhood Lottery, a review covering 162 measures across health, education, housing, safety and youth services. The report used 96 measures to score local authorities. It says the scores combine children’s challenges, access to services and outcomes, and are not assessments of council performance. De Souza described conditions for children in some communities as a “state of emergency.”
Middlesbrough, Hounslow and Bradford had the lowest overall scores. The report found that lower scores generally coincided with higher child poverty, while identifying exceptions. It also linked differences between places partly to poverty and fragmented service boundaries.
Youth-services spending varied sharply. Halton, Herefordshire, Slough and Warrington each reported £0 in 2024-25 spending per person aged 13 to 19. Camden reported the highest amount, £421 per teenager. The median was £92 among authorities with usable data. These figures measure reported spending and do not by themselves establish whether a council provided youth services.
For mental health care, the median time from a child’s referral to a second contact ranged from six days in the NHS Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland integrated care board to 118 days in Hampshire and Isle of Wight in 2024-25. These are board-level medians and do not describe every child’s wait.
De Souza urged ministers to set minimum standards for children’s outcomes and create a fund that areas below those standards could use to support services. The report also proposes a children’s test to assess the impact of strategic authorities’ policies and recommends that each appoint a deputy mayor for children or a designated lead.
The report says children facing poorer access and outcomes bear the cost of current gaps. The proposed test would assess how strategic authorities’ policies affect children, while minimum outcome standards would determine when local areas could draw on the fund.
