Agenda item

Councillor Ray Gooding, the Deputy Portfolio Holder for Children Services, Jenny Boyd, the West Director of Local Delivery and Lonica Vanclay, Head of Locality Commissioning will attend the meeting and will focus on Essex County Council's responses to the recommendations to the Children's Services Task & Finish Review.

A copy of the Task and Finish final report is attached for reference along with the updating report submitted to the O&S meeting in October 2011.

The Committee received a presentation from County Councillor Ray Gooding, the Deputy Portfolio Holder for Children Services, Jenny Boyd, the Director of Local Delivery West and Lonica Vanclay, Head of  Locality Commissioning. They were there to speak about progress made by County on the provision of children services and to respond to the recent District Council’s Task and Finish Panel’s report on children services. A copy of their presentation is attached to these minutes.

The Committee noted that in recent years ECC’s Children’s Social Care was characterised by high levels of unallocated work; the use of high numbers of agency staff; they were risk adverse with a process led and procedure driven culture, which was managed from the centre. This tended to lead to high numbers of children in care and subject to child protection plans, with a significant number of serious case reviews with a high spend on legal services; this resulted in defensive or reactive practices. Essex County Council reacted by putting in a strong and robust improvement plan which resulted in an improved Ofsted inspection (in September 2011) of an improved rating to “Adequate” from “Inadequate” in previous years. They have now moved into phase 2 of their improvement plan.

A new senior management team and a new quadrant structure had been put in place to bring practices in line with the principles of the Munro review of child protection.  They aimed to invest in staff, improve supervision and support for social workers, improve social work practice, use social work skills to work with families to bring about change and build resilience. They were also building strong relationships with key partners to enable collaborative working and an integrated approach to providing help to families.

Each of the quadrants would cover the whole portfolio of operational Children’s Social Care, with the commissioning budgets and associated decision making devolved down to each quadrant. The quadrant directors would hold strategic county wide leads and be responsible within the locality partnerships for all Social Care quadrant delivery.

Achievements in the West / Epping Forest District included bringing down the number of unallocated cases; completing the number of assessments within the timescale; the number of children on a child protection plan was down considerably; and many families were now supported at an earlier stage. It was also noted that a professional disagreement process was adapted with West contacts.

County were developing a single strategic commissioning approach across children’s and adult services and wanted to work with partners for smarter commissioning with reduced duplication and costs.

They were reviewing what they would deliver directly and what they would commission others to deliver. But, as with all public bodies they were bound by procurement regulations on tendering. They noted that there were advantages in up-scaling and that some commissioning would be County wide and some local. Although EFDC’s Task and Finish Panel had recommended that the District Council take over most of the local youth services, County were bound to go through the local procurement / open tendering process.

Recommendation 4 of the Task and Finish Panel’s report had asked for a formal system to be put in place so that elected members were informed of how to and who to liaise with at County when they had problems or safeguarding issues. County had set up the Members Enquiries Team in May 2011 as part of a pilot to improve and establish a process for responding to Member and MP correspondence in relation to complaints and formal representations.  Their service standards are:

• Formal e-mail  acknowledgement – 24 hours;
• Formal letter acknowledgement  - 3 working days ; and
• Full response timescale – up to 10 working days.

The pilot phase had ended in December 2011 and this process would be formalised between April and June 2012 including a formal policy and procedure document which would be published for Members and MPs. Contact should be in writing (preferably) to keep track of details, etc. The contact details are:

• E-mail – member.enquiries@essex.gov.uk
• Postal address – Member Enquiries Team, Essex County Council, County Hall, Chelmsford, CM1 1LX;
• Telephone – 01245 437278 (for Highways related issues the number is: 08457 430430.
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The service operates from Monday to Thursday 9am to 5.30pm and Fridays 9am to 4.30pm.

In response to the Task and Finish Panel’s report, District Councillors were welcome to participate in this service. This service would not prohibit members from corresponding with officers directly.

The Chairman thanked Jenny Boyd, Lonica Vanclay and County Councillor Ray Gooding for their informative presentation. He understood that there had been problems last year and they were in the middle of rectifying them this year as changes in organisations took time to bear fruit. He then asked if they could speak about local commissioning.

The meeting were told that through the West Children’s Commissioning and Delivery Board and the EF District Children’s Partnership (which Julie Chandler chairs); partners had identified a number of areas for services to be commissioned and following a procurement process, this will move forward locally. They knew that a centralised approach was efficient but could conflict with what was needed locally. Services could be commissioned both centrally and locally to create the best outcomes for people.

He then opened the meeting up to member’s questions.

Q.        Can you give us some specifics about what was happening in our district? There was a need to clarify the role we play in Children’s Services and the statistics for our area.

A.         The relevant information and statistics for this area is provided quarterly to WECCDB members (Julie Chandler for EFDC) and is on the Essex Insight websites, but they agreed that it would be helpful to be more proactive on this and circulate summarised information regularly. EFDC’s representative on the Stay Safe Group would have a lot of the safeguarding information and could circulate this to Members. The number of families being helped by multiagency activity and by CSC was known, but it was hard to get exact figures on total numbers as a family could be in touch with only just one organisation and not several.

Q.        Trouble families in our area need help, are we given this information?

A.         No names are provided as families would have to give consent for us to share their details. Your housing officers have access to some of this information and are invited to attend joint planning meeting for specific cases when they are involved.

Q.        It’s not satisfactory to say that our representative at the Stay Safe Group has all that information, as we still had concerns. We need to convert this high level of information into general, useful information for the district.  We have raised the question of children at risk and had put these to ECC but were told that we had not followed proper procedures. We were also told that Housing Officers had trouble referring families to ECC. Are these systems getting better?

A.         We share your concerns of these cases; information should be shared with the people who need to know. We need to look at how these protocols work and that the District Councils are aware of the protocols and how they work and why. This is something we shall take away today to consider. We must move on from our past mistakes and work on a joint basis.

Jenny Boyd added that if members or officers had serious concerns on safeguarding issues then we should let her know – we need to gain the trust of yourselves and the public.

Q.        This is a disappointing report – you have climbed up from special measures and are now regarded as ‘Adequate’.  What you have achieved is good news but this is a year of cutbacks with two more years to come.  I am worried for our children, EFDC had not made cutbacks to its services for children, but I cannot see that it would get any better in the next two years and this was very worrying.

A.         We would never accept just ‘Adequate’ and are aiming for outstanding; but it will take time for us to put the processes in place. We feel optimistic about the direction we are going in.

Q.        What does your budgets look like?

A.         It looks fairly robust for Children Services. We may have to make some cuts but not to front line services. We are also looking at contracts etc.

Q.        As member for Loughton Alderton, how much can you provide for the ‘Sure Start’ in the future?

A.         This is tailored to particular areas to suit local requirements; we do not know your particular circumstances.

Q.        There is a review of Youth Services going on at present. There are concerns about the youth centre only open one night a week. Can the volunteer sector take up the slack?

A.         Our understanding is that things are offered at the Borders Lane centre for four nights a week by ourselves and the voluntary sector.  There needs to be more work to ensure the building is used during the day and in the evening. There are issues about keys and insurance etc. that causes difficulties.

Q.        We have partnership arrangements with local charities working with young people, such as ‘Home Start’. I am not sure that they get grants from County. To what extent do you work with such organisations?

A.         We work with a lot of organisations, including ‘Home Start’ who we do give funding to and who would get funding from elsewhere as well.

Q.        We run the new centre at Limes Farm without any difficulties in relation to keys and other things. I think the Borders Lane debacle was largely the result of not looking at this on a local basis and not just as a broad brush exercise. We would be much more comfortable if we felt Essex was making the right judgement calls between what was being done locally and what wasn’t. We need to get things down to a local level and are disappointed that it was not happening. There are three questions I would like answered either now or taken away:

1)         How are the Early Intervention Fund for child and adolescent mental health, centrally commissioned services be evaluated to ensure they meet local needs and priorities on the ground?

2)         What has ECC decided it is going to do with the Youth Centre at Ongar, given that services are reducing? And

3)         Will it be for the county to be measuring the impact of the loss of youth service provision or will that be something for us?

A.         We will take these away and look into them.

The Chairman summed up by saying that ECC was still coming to grips with the problems and issues to be addressed. Whilst we appreciated it was work in progress there are still many areas of concern and he asked if they could come back again in about 6 months time or so to update us? Councillor Gooding replied that he was happy to do so. Tonight had proved to be helpful and it was important that we worked together; the District needed to be their eyes and ears.

Subsequent to the meeting, the following answers to the above questions were provided:

1)         How are Early Intervention Fund for child and adolescent mental health, centrally commissioned services be evaluated to ensure they meet local needs and priorities on the ground?

Contracted providers will provide regular monitoring reports and the Local Hub Teams will have regular contact with providers. This information is shared with the WECCDB.

2)         What has the ECC decided it is going to do with the Youth Centre at Ongar, given that services are reducing?

With fewer youth workers ECC will be changing focus from solely direct delivery to include a youth and community development role supporting the development and delivery of youth provision by local people in line with the Big Society approach. Following the restructure there will be a reduction in direct delivery by ECC; however Youth Workers role will encourage growth of new recreational based activity. Ongar Youth Centre will be a key asset in delivering this.

3)         Will ECC be measuring the impact of the loss of local youth service provision, or will this be down to the District Council?

As stated above following the restructure there will be a short period of service reduction however part of a Youth Workers role will be to encourage growth of new recreational based activity. Supported by local partnerships there may well be an increase in overall activity as is already happening in some areas. Essex County Council will be monitoring this, including partners through local partnerships.