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Rachel Reeves has announced a flagship policy for children and youth service – but by overpromising, underfunding, and buck-passing to bankrupt local councils, she has revealed not a bold new agenda but a dangerous hypocrisy.

It seems very strange behaviour for someone who claims her deepest political motivation is to help children “facing the toughest challenges”.

The better futures fund: too little, too late

Reeves’s new £500 million “Better Futures Fund” for charities and local authorities to invest in youth services has been billed as a flagship policy to help children struggling with mental health, exclusion from school, or contact with the criminal justice system.

She says it will offer “hundreds of thousands of children” a better chance.

But let’s look past the soundbites.

First, the money isn’t enough.

Reeves plans to spread the £500 million over six years.

That’s around £83 million per year.

In contrast, the independent Competition and Markets Authority has estimated that reforming children’s social care alone requires at least £620 million per year.

Experts say a much more credible figure would be £650 million to restore basic early support services for children and families.

It isn’t all new money.

The Better Futures Fund is a rebranded and expanded version of the Conservatives’ “Life Chances Fund” — which was already quietly operating, albeit with only £70 million.

The new plan relies on “match-funding” from other sources, including local government, to double the pot to £1 billion.

But that is pure fantasy.

Local authorities are not sitting on spare cash.

They’re broke.

Local councils face a funding gap of £4 billion over the next two years just to maintain existing services.

Many have already slashed youth centres, early help teams, children’s centres, and mental health outreach services:

National trends show children’s services funding fell by about 23 per cent between 2010 and 2019, including a drop of £2.2  billion nationally and £536 million in local authority spending.

At the same time late intervention spending rose sharply.

Sure Start and related early years services have endured worst cuts to discretionary services.

Newcastle, for example, cut 36 per cent from Sure Start budgets over five years.

Between 2010–11 and 2020–21, Haringey Council’s spending on early help halved (from £3.8 billion to £1.9 billion across all councils); in Haringey specifically, children’s services budgets fell from £104 million to £68.9 million—a 34 per cent cut.

Late intervention budgets also dropped from £75 million to £55 million.

More than 60 English councils are at risk of issuing Section 114 notices — legal declarations of bankruptcy — by 2026.

Birmingham, Croydon, Thurrock, Woking, and Nottingham have all issued Section 114 notices already.

Most others are on the brink.

So where exactly does Reeves think she is going to get this match funding?

The two-child cap: a red line Labour won’t cross

Third, and most damningly, Reeves refuses to scrap the two-child benefit cap — a policy Labour’s own MPs have called “cruel”, “punitive”, and a leading cause of rising child poverty.

Research shows the cap has pushed an estimated 1.6 million children into poverty.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Resolution Foundation have both called for its abolition.

But Reeves says Labour cannot afford the £3.6 billion per year it would cost to give those children what they need.

And yet she wants us to believe that she entered politics to help children?

The real price of giving children a chance

Let’s add it up.

To give the UK’s most vulnerable children a genuine chance, we would need:

• £3.6 billion per year to end the two-child benefit cap
• £650 million per year to rebuild youth and early intervention services

Total: £4.25 billion per year.

What Reeves is offering is £500 million over six years, which is £83 million per year.

That’s just two per cent of what’s needed.

And most of it relies on co-investment that doesn’t exist.

This is not a serious plan.

It is a public relations exercise.

It allows Labour to say it’s doing something for children while keeping the fiscal straitjacket of austerity firmly in place.

Words without action

Reeves is dressing up failure as reform.

Worse, she’s doing so while publicly presenting herself as a champion of children.

In her own words: “I got into politics to help children facing the toughest challenges.”

But when faced with the most basic test of that commitment — abolishing a policy that actively punishes poor children for being born — she flinches.

Pulling up the ladder

Here is the final betrayal:

Rachel Reeves built her life on the support of the state.

She attended a comprehensive school, studied at Oxford, and benefited from public investment in education and services that made her success possible.

Now that she has climbed the ladder, she is pulling it up behind her.

And she’s doing it while telling the public she’s holding the ladder steady for everyone else.

That isn’t leadership.

It is nothing short of the most blatant hypocrisy.

Britain’s children will pay the price.

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