The role that area deprivation, family poverty, and austerity policies play in the demand for and supply of children's services has been a contested issue in England in recent years. These relationships have begun to be explored through the concept of inequalities in child welfare, in parallel to the established fields of inequalities in education and health. This article focuses on the relationship between economic inequality and out-of-home care and child protection interventions. The work scales up a pilot study in the West Midlands to an all-England sample, representative of English regions and different levels of deprivation at a local authority (LA) level. The analysis evidences a strong relationship between deprivation and intervention rates and large inequalities between ethnic categories. There is further evidence of the inverse intervention law (Bywaters et al., 2015): For any given level of neighbourhood deprivation, higher rates of child welfare interventions are found in LAs that are less deprived overall. These patterns are taking place in the context of cuts in spending on English children's services between 2010-2011 and 2014-2015 that have been greatest in more deprived LAs. Implications for policy and practice to reduce such inequalities are suggested.

The relationship between children's material circumstances and child abuse and neglect raises a series of questions for policy, practice, and practitioners. Children and families in poverty are significantly more likely to be the subject of state intervention. This article, based on a unique mixed‐methods study of social work interventions and the influence of poverty, highlights a narrative from practitioners that argues that, as many poor families do not harm their children, it is stigmatizing to discuss a link between poverty and child abuse and neglect. The data reveal that poverty has become invisible in practice, in part justified by avoiding stigma but also because of a lack of up‐to‐date research knowledge and investment by some social workers in an “underclass” discourse. We argue, in light of the evidence that poverty is a contributory factor in the risk of harm, that it is vital that social work engages with the evidence and in critical reflection about intervening in the context of poverty. We identify the need for fresh approaches to the harms children and families face in order to support practices that engage confidently with the consequences of poverty and deprivation.

Comparative International data on patterns of inequality in child welfare interventions, for example, the proportion of children about whom there are substantiated child protection (CP) concerns or who are in out-of-home care (CLA), are far less developed than data about inequalities in health. Few countries collect reliable, comprehensive information and definitions, methods of data collection and analysis are rarely consistent. The four UK countries (England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales) provide a potential 'natural experiment' for comparing intervention patterns. This study reports on a large quantitative, descriptive study focusing on children in contact with children's services on a single date in 2015. It found that children's chances of receiving a child protection intervention was primarily related to family socio-economic circumstances, measured by neighbourhood deprivation, within all four countries and in every local area. There was a strong social gradient which was significantly steeper in some countries than others. Ethnicity was another important factor underlying inequalities. While inequalities in patterns of intervention between the four countries were considerable, they did not mirror relative levels of deprivation in the child population. Inequalities in intervention rates result from a combination of demand and supply factors. The level and extent of inequity raise profound ethical, economic and practical challenges to those involved in child protection, the wider society and the state.

Attempts to record, understand and respond to variations in child welfare and protection reporting, service patterns and outcomes are international, numerous and longstanding.Reframing such variations as an issue of inequity between children and between families opens the way to a new approach to explaining the profound difference in intervention rates between and within countries and administrative districts. Recent accounts of variation have frequently been based on the idea that there is a binary divide between bias and risk (or need).Here we propose seeing supply (bias) and demand (risk) factors as two aspects of a single system, both framed, in part, by social structures. A recent finding from a study of intervention rates in England, the 'inverse intervention law', is used to illustrate the complex ways in which a range of factors interact to produce intervention rates. In turn, this analysis raises profound moral, policy, practice and research questions about current child welfare and child protection services.