Issue - meetings

As detailed in the recommendations.

Councillor Jones introduced the report and explained that the Council was committed to ensuring children and young people received high quality care so they were, and felt, safe, loved and supported to develop the skills and resilience to lead fulfilled lives.

            The main aim was to support families to care for their own children, and to prevent them, if safe to do so, from becoming looked after.  Where children needed to be looked after, the Council would want to ensure that suitable and timely placements could be made.  However, there were significant challenges wit placement sufficiently.  The authority was reliant on the independent sector for Children’s Residential Care provision.  That provision was very expensive and often in placements that were out of area, which had led to children being placed away from their communities at an increasing, and unsuitable, financial cost to the local authority.

            To secure change a commitment had been set to develop a Residential Care Home provision for children and young people, with details of the priorities for the next three financial years through the delivery of the following projects:

1.    Arosfa – to support a growing number of disabled children and their parents/carers

2.    Ty Nyth – to provide specialist therapeutic assessment and support

3.    Emergency Provision – to enable an effective response to crisis situations

4.    Small Group Homes – to enable children to live within their local community

            The Chief Officer (Social Services) emphasised the importance that the development of an in house residential Children’s Care Home was seen as part of a whole system approach to supporting children and young people.  It involved a number of complimentary projects to:

            Reduce the number of children looked after by:

·         Strengthening edge of care provision to support children safely and appropriately at home and prevent them needing to enter the formal looked after care system

·         Working to revoke court orders to ensure that children who no longer needed to be in care could safely exit the care system

·         Developing a support package for Special Guardianship arrangements in line with the financial and support arrangements for foster carers

Support more children through local authority fostering by:

·         Attracting more general foster carers through a Methu Wales/Foster Wales campaign

·         Expanding the Mockingbird Hub model

Members welcomed the report and supported the development of an in house Residential Care Home for children which would help with reducing the cost of Out of County placements.