care and therapeutic support teams and using evidence- based models to help prevent family breakdown and support residential and foster placements. Another had also developed a specialist team whose staff carried very low caseloads with the aim of supporting parents and other professionals to manage autistic children’s needs at home. Several were considering providing intensive support including short breaks to help parents manage their children at home. 72 6 Local safeguarding partnerships Multi-agency safeguarding arrangements (MASA) involve local authorities, police and integrated care boards (ICBs) working together to safeguard children as set out in statutory guidance (HM Government, 2023). DCSs described the essential nature of effective multi- agency safeguarding arrangements and the challenges therein. Of the 86 SP survey respondents, 41% said that the capacity of police as safeguarding partners for children and young people had deteriorated over the last two years, and 45% thought that the introduction of ICBs13 had led to a deterioration in the response to the health and safeguarding needs of local children and young people. Local multi-agency working is essential to safeguarding policy, strategy and practice, and partnership working was explored in depth during the interviews with DCSs. The funding pressures of the last 14 years continue to impact on all safeguarding partners (Ofsted, 2023) and this is contributing to a lack of capacity for appropriate involvement; ICB budgets have been reduced by 30% since they were introduced in summer 2022. Operational borders for the work of the three partners are rarely coterminous. Some local authorities must engage with more than one ICB, while ICBs and police forces often work across multiple local authority areas; th