11 August 2010
A senior councillor has issued a fresh warning that ‘every part’ of the child social care system is under immense strain as demand continues to increase in the aftermath of the Baby Peter case.
Shireen Ritchie, chair of the Young People’s Board at the Local GovernmentAssociation, told Public Finance that social workers, family courts and Cafcass, the legal support service for cases involving children, were ‘under a huge amount of pressure and strain’.
She hoped two independent reviews currently being conducted for the government, one on the family justice system and another on child protection, would ‘relieve some of the pressure’. Social workers should be freed up from bureaucracy to spend more face-to-face time with families in need, she said.
The Conservative councillor for the Royal London Borough of Kensington & Chelsea also defended the LGA’s argument against ring-fencing child social care budgets, despite continued public hype over child protection and the current squeeze on public spending.
She said the priority to protect vulnerable children for councils remains ‘absolutely at the highest level’ and the fact that children’s services have not been ring-fenced ‘does not necessarily mean that local authorities are going to be putting the money in different areas’.
She added that while councils were concerned about future funding for children’s services, which involved huge costs, ‘fundamentally it’s not about money, it’s about providing the best services for these particular families and vulnerable children and that’s what drives local authorities’.
Ritchie’s comments came as a series of new findings relating to the care system came to light. The Barnardos charity warned that vulnerable children in England and Wales were being ‘damaged'by record delays in care hearings. It uncovered data revealing that children are waiting on average more than a year (57 weeks) in unstable, sometimes abusive, family homes or emergency foster care placements before a county court decides if they will be taken into care. Family proceedings in magistrate courts are only slightly less lengthy, taking 45 weeks on average.
Meanwhile the Fostering Network published a report, Bursting at the seams, warning that foster care services were under ‘unprecedented pressure’ following a rise in children being taken into local authority care and a chronic shortage of foster carers.
Both warnings followed two watchdogs, Ofsted and the National Audit Office, highlighting the strain children’s services are under. A survey by the education and children’s services regulator revealed that only one in five social workers felt they had enough time to work properly on their caseloads because of too much paperwork and other bureaucracy.
The NAO found that Cafcass had been unable to keep up with the rise in demand for family court advisers and that the number of children involved in cases without their support increased from 250 to 1,250 between November 2008 and July 2009.
