To request the drawdown from the Financial Resilience Reserve, a total of £11.49m to support the ongoing delivery of the Children’s Services Improvement Plan.

The cabinet member children and families introduced the item. She summarised the requested investment from the Financial Resilience Reserve, a total of £11.49m to support the ongoing delivery of the Children’s Services Improvement Plan. This funding would be allocated in two tranches, with £5m in tranche one from April 2022 and a further £6.49m from July 2022, with detail on progress to be reported back to Cabinet. The cabinet member thanked councillors who had attended recent presentations for their comments and challenges and also thanked officers for their work in putting together the investment proposal.

The cabinet member summarised the previous investment made in children’s services, the importance of ensuring the momentum was maintained and the key objectives of this additional investment proposal.

The corporate director for children and families spoke on the need for significant improvement, the progress that had been made over the past year in stabilising the service and understanding the challenges and the next stages in transforming the service. Improvements were starting to be seen in a number of areas but this needed to be maintained and embedded. It was expected that the transformation would take three years overall.

The corporate director then set out the key points of the proposals and explained the governance surrounding future decisions.

Cabinet members discussed the proposals and it was noted that:

·       This represented a significant investment in children’s services and showed the importance placed on addressing the issues that had been identified;

·       It was important to address recruitment and retention;

·       The scale of the investment was more than double what had originally been expected but this reflected the scale of the work required and was in keeping with the level of spend in other councils going through similar improvement journeys;

·       Areas of deprivation in the county create huge social problems and it would not be just for children’s services to address these, but would also involve public health, education providers and other services;

·       All councillors had supported the implementation of the improvement strategy for children’s services and it was hoped that they would understand the need for this investment and support it.

The chairperson of the children and young people scrutiny committee spoke on the report. The committee had not yet scrutinised the investment but the chair and vice chair had discussed the proposal and supported it in principle. He commented that it was realistic to say that a three year period was required to deliver sustained improvement and that increased capacity was needed to deliver the improvement plan. Good project management was critical to ensure that improvement and it was also important to keep councillors informed about progress.

Responding to points raised by the scrutiny chairperson, officers confirmed that the grant of £1.7m from the Department for Education had mostly been used to support increased improvement activity including scoping of some of the early help services. They also confirmed that progress would be reported back to Cabinet quarterly and that all councillors would receive updates bi-monthly. An independent assurance review and challenge system was also being set up.

Group leaders gave the views and queries from their groups. It was noted that:

·       Investment in improvements to the service needed to be supported but value for money had to be demonstrated;

·       It was important that the investment showed results and that there was accountability through the project management and assurance systems;

·       It was a pity that the detailed proposal had not been available when the budget was scrutinised at the start of the year, briefings had been provided to all councillors as soon as possible once the proposal had been finalised;

·       The financial resilience reserve would cover the requested investment and the S151 officer was comfortable that the council had sufficient other reserves;

·       Benchmarking against other councils was important to understand what comparator councils were spending and how Herefordshire services compared;

·       Early help services had to be part of the solution, a broad partnership approach would provide wider support;

·       The council wanted to increase the number of permanent staff as while agency staff were good, the costs were significant;

·       Recruitment of social workers remained difficult due to a lack of experienced social workers in the market, the council was looking at options including approaching retired staff and developing staff within the council;

·       The reintroduction of service managers had already delivered significant improvement as a result of frequent and good quality supervision;

·       Average caseloads were given as mean data and officers were examining how these figures could be presented better, the majority of teams were seeing reduced average caseloads and most good and outstanding councils typically had caseloads of 15 to 18 cases;

·       There was support and gratitude for the social work teams and the difficult job they did.

It was resolved that:

a)     The drawdown of up to £11.49m from the Financial Resilience Reserve, in two tranches as laid out above, is approved to support resourcing the transformation stage of children’s services; and

b)     Cabinet note the increased base budget requirement for 2023/24 onwards.