School taxis bill ‘a strain’ on council

costs for taxis to take children to and from school are putting yet more “severe” strain on stretched council finances in Newcastle.

Civic centre bosses have warned of “significant pressures” on its children’s social care budget, at a time when the authority is grappling with how to cut its spending by £60m over the next three years. According to a new report, there has been a 35% jump in the council’s taxi bills for children in the local authority’s care – from £782,000 in 2022/23 to a projected £1.2m by the end of the current financial year.

And that figure only accounts for the 110 to 150 children in the social care system, not the hundreds more with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) that the council also has a legal duty to provide home-to-school travel for.

The Northern Agenda newsletter reported last May that Newcastle City Council was spending almost £167,000 every week on taxis for those children.

The authority was meant to save £155,000 on its school taxi spend for children in care this year under previous budget cut plans, but has instead seen costs go dramatically in the other direction – something it blames on inflation and reduced availability of taxis.

A council spokesperson said: “The rising cost of providing taxis for children in social care is a national issue which is placing many local authorities up and down the country under severe financial pressure. Even though the numbers of our children requiring taxis is largely unchanged, the cost of providing this service has increased due to inflation driving up costs across the board and reduced availability of taxis since the pandemic.”

Overall, the council’s children’s social care services are expected to overspend their 2023/24 budget by just over £3m – with the price of a “small number of very high cost placements” in external residential accommodation contributing to the bulk of that.

Data obtained by the Northern Agenda last year showed North East councils were spending more than £1.4m every week on home-to-school transport for SEND children, with the large rural patches of Northumberland and County Durham racking up the biggest costs.