There has been a major change of tack at Birmingham’s inadequate children’s services department.
For several years now all who care to listen have been reliably told by a succession of officials and politicians that progress is being made and improvement is just around the corner – despite damning evidence to the contrary.
Now, following the departure earlier this summer of strategic director Peter Duxbury, there appears to be a different message. In July the council’s vulnerable children scrutiny committee was told by his successor Peter Hay that the department cannot guarantee the safety of children under its care, so deep-rooted are the problems.
But if that message was not bleak enough, the committee’s September meeting was given an even more desperate assessment from children’s services director Jacqui Jensen.
It is doubtful that Birmingham City Council has witnessed a more downbeat assessment of one of its departments by its own management.
There was no attempt to brush over failings and poor performance and no attempt to put any positive spin on the situation. It was about as bad as it can get – like an alcoholic at rock bottom.
Her presentation was bleak – there is a recruitment crisis with a huge number of vacancies.
Social workers are facing unprecedented and unsustainable workloads leading to an increase in sickness absence and stress.
This is the department dealing with some of the most tragic and complex issues of any council department – going into homes and making assessments on abuse allegations or parents’ ability to cope. The likes of Daniel Pelka, Baby Peter Conelley, Keanu Williams and Khyra Ishaq – children who died from parental abuse – are the well-known results of mistakes.
And the situation in Birmingham has been compounded by neighbouring Sandwell borough trying to wriggle out of its own recruitment problem by ‘going for broke’ with golden hellos and increased pay rates to secure the best available staff. Leaving even more holes in the staffing.
“What is the current absence rate?” asked Coun James Bird, the Conservative shadow cabinet member for children’s services.
“I’m too scared to look,” replied Ms Jensen.
“The staffing situation is very grave,” she explained, “We are also struggling to fill with agency staff. This doesn’t help with the stress levels. Our staff are struggling.”
The department, under Peter Hay, has announced a move towards a more open culture where failings and criticism can be aired and whistles blown without fear of retribution. But even by those standards this was brutal stuff.
Committee chairwoman Anita Ward pointed out: “We haven’t moved forward in the last 12 months.”
The politician responsible, Labour Cabinet member Coun Brigid Jones, seems to be very able in other arenas, but her appearances before the committee appear underwhelming at best. Perhaps it is the sheer scale of the problems in her department.
Her contributions were also fleeting as she dashed in and out of the scrutiny committee due to other pressing business elsewhere in the Council House.
It is clear that patience is wearing very thin with the leadership. They are not one of these committees slavish to the party line, where only a minority of opposition members dare criticise.
It is a committee filled with the likes of Coun Barry Bowles (Hall Green), who speaks with the air of an outraged London cabbie, former teacher Val Seabright (Kings Norton), youth worker Andy Cartwright (Longbridge) and Reg Corns (Northfield) – a former resident of Birmingham’s children’s homes. They take the safety and protection of the city’s children very seriously.
In fact not one of Labour members leapt to the defence of their cabinet member Brigid Jones, when her Tory opposite number James Bird described her management as ‘bumbling’.
They also took Coun Jones to task over the controversial cuts in Home to School Transports – with councillor Bowles highlighting the case of a special needs pupil picked up at 6.45am for school and delivered home at 6pm.
The council’s own monitoring showed that only 14 per cent of statements for special needs pupils are carried out on time, 26 weeks, leading to huge backlog of children with special needs not getting the school places or support services they need.
The response was that the number of children requiring statements had risen by 50 per cent, from 800 a year to 1,200 since 2011.
This week is was confirmed that Peter Hay, the director of adult social care, would now also be running children’s services and education from now on. He certainly has his work cut out.
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Running a close second in the downbeat stakes has been Sir Albert Bore’s regular references to the ‘jaws of doom’ and ‘end of local government as we know it’.
After the financial gap widened, he was challenged by Birmingham Post columnist David Bailey, from Coventry University Business School, to find a new level of apocalyptic jargon - to find a way of describing ‘a fate worse than a fate worse than death’.
Well according to those inside a recent Labour Group meeting he has done just that. Welcome to local government ‘armageddon’ folks.
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Meanwhile according to the list of demands from Sutton Coldfield residents bidding to set up their own town council they are in fact going for little short of independent statehood, Crown Protectorate status at least.
They include the right to set council tax, transport policy and policing and ‘legal affirmation, consolidation and control of the existing Sutton border’.
This on the face of it suggests an electric fence along the Chester Road, with perhaps a recreation of the Brandenburg Gate at Beggar’s Bush.
At least they are not suggesting the right to raise an army, and no plans for a Sutton Coldfield passport yet. That may be going too far.
