Questions have been raised over a £17m funding “black hole” for Sefton’s troubled children’s services.
Providing a cabinet update report last night to members of the council’s overview and scrutiny committee, cabinet member Cllr Paulette Lappin said the council was in a “very difficult set of circumstances” when it comes to funding key aspects of the service with a £17m overspend on the agreed budget.
She said one of the major issues putting pressure on the budget is the need for “managed teams” – whole teams of social workers and managers brought in on agency rates to run specific aspects of a social work in a local authority to fill chronic staff shortages.
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In Sefton, these are costing the council “upwards of £1m a year” adding to the “huge strain on resources”.
Cllr Lappin said: “Recruitment of social workers is one of the worst areas and we are having to employ a lot of agency and temporary staff to look at some of the issues and try to build on some of that improvement into the service.”
She added that the council had little option but to bring in managed teams and agency staff to meet statutory obligations, saying: “We have nowhere else to go, we can’t not have those people in place it’s a breach of our statutory duty,”
She said other factors increasing costs way beyond the initial budget include “the number of looked after children, accommodation costs in terms of number and value and increased legal costs right across the board of the whole the service.”
Cllr Lappin said many of the issues the council is facing come from “historic” factors.
Referring to spiralling costs of accommodation and placements, she said: “It stems from the privatisation of children’s homes, it stems from the fact that the people who own those homes are profit oriented so therefore they actually up the ante and up the profit basically and it’s a very difficult set of circumstances the council is finding itself in and all councils are finding themselves in right across the board.”
She added that while the Ofsted report released last year which rated the service as inadequate and led to commissioners being appointed “states there has to be longer term financial planning”, there are “internal management systems that are hard to relate to that expenditure.”
Cllr Les Byrom said that while “there’s always been an overspend” in children’s services, he “can’t remember there ever being an overspend to the level of £17m” and asked about implications for the improvement plan currently in place to transform the service.
Cllr Byrom said: “Is the commissioner anticipated to make any comment about this – the level of funding that’s available – how it’s possible to square a service with that sort of budget?”
Cllr Lappin responded, saying: “The children’s improvement plan has been put in place and the commissioner will comment on the actions put in place but I don’t think the commissioner will necessarily make comment on the level of funding put into social services.
“While the problems are national, it’s a very real issue here and takes us back to the cuts that have taken place over the past 10 or 12 years where now we find ourselves in the position where 70 to 80% of our council spending is on adult and children’s social services.
Cllr Lappin added that while the council’s upcoming budget plan, due to be brought to the committee next month will seek to “address these problems” the process of building in the expenses for social care will be one of the “major elements and challenges” of next year’s budget.
She said: “The bottom line is we’re not getting any extra help from anywhere and it’s all very difficult and a lot of this stuff is completely out of our control. We grapple through, we try to do our best but it’s just not helped by the environment we function in.”
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