Childhood Has Been Sorted By Postal Code

A child should not need a promising address to qualify for a functioning country. Yet England has developed a remarkably exact system for making a national promise expire at the council boundary.

The BBC reports that the children's commissioner found a six-day wait for referral for mental health assessments in Leicester, against 118 days in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. Those are referral figures, not a claim that treatment starts on day seven. Even the entrance to the queue has acquired a lengthy queue. British administration has discovered a way to make waiting reproduce.

Dame Rachel de Souza's report examined a hundred measures of children's lives. In four council areas, spending on youth services per teenager was zero. A beautifully unambiguous figure. No difficult debate about whether the last pound was well spent. The last pound has avoided the controversy by not existing.

The report also records children describing parks they cannot use because of crime. That detail matters more than another ministerial promise to unlock potential. A park is already a reasonably straightforward technology for childhood. It has grass. You go outside. If children cannot safely use it, perhaps we could temporarily suspend the national search for an innovative delivery model and examine the bit where they cannot safely use it.

This is not a tidy map with rich areas succeeding and poor areas failing. De Souza found strong provision in deprived Haringey and weaker results in relatively affluent Cambridge. Poverty matters; so do capacity and services. That makes the findings harder to excuse, not easier. You cannot explain every missing service by pointing at a neighborhood's income and declaring the investigation complete. Some places have managed better with less. Others appear to have mistaken a reassuring average house price for a youth worker.

The government says it is investing across childhood and opening 1,000 family hubs. Those are commitments worth examining as they develop. They are not a time machine for the child currently waiting. We have already looked at public services that ask people to travel farther for care. Geography becomes a remarkably convenient administrative solution when the institution does not have to do the traveling.

Education Secretary Lucy Powell promises no child will be held back by where they grow up. Good. Now hold that sentence beside the referral figures. The sentence covers England. The service appears to have a more selective delivery area.

De Souza calls for minimum standards and emergency funding. The principle is almost embarrassingly modest: childhood should come with a floor beneath it. We are not discussing a concierge service in which a small person rings a silver bell and requests a better adolescence. We are discussing whether ordinary support exists when needed.

Until that floor is real, the grand national promise should come with the same instruction as a delivery website: enter your postal code to discover which parts of the country the country actually serves.