estment in the Autumn Budget. Health services are an important part of the picture here. 33 3 Early help, family help Early help for children and families broadly describes a range of activities across universal services, such as schools, and targeted services, such as youth work, to respond and support early and prevent escalation of problems (Ofsted, 2022b). Over the years of funding shortfalls, local authorities have had to divert funds from preventative services to meet statutory duties for children’s social care (CCN, 2020). Targeted early help funding has fallen by more than 44% since 2010, alongside a 57% increase in spend on statutory services, leaving early help in 2023 at less than 18% of total children’s services spend, compared with 36% in 2010–11 (Larkham, 2024). The impact of austerity on health, youth and wider public services in parallel contributes to children and families’ problems intensifying and requiring more intrusive and expensive statutory intervention (Ofsted, 2023; Pro Bono Economics, 2022). Conversely, in areas that have been able to invest in and sustain early help over time, DCSs reported being able to track the direct relationship between this work and the stemming of statutory child protection responses. One DCS in a high-performing authority attributed their unusually strong ability to invest over the long term to stability – across the political make-up of the local authority and in long-standing working relationships between lead member, chief executive and DCS over many years. We’re an authority that has invested millions in early intervention over 10 years, so schools do 70% of our early help… so we do have low numbers [of children in care] … My lead member will take decisions to invest in things that will come to fruition in six or 