Agenda item

That the report be noted.

            The Chief Officer (Social Services) introduced the new revised format report.  He stated that the monitoring of the services was mainly positive but had been a challenging year and the delivery of some services had not met their targets but that both Adult and Children’s Services had been very resilient and provided very good levels of service given the circumstances of the pandemic.

            The Senior Manager - Children and Workforce expanded on the indicator of children who had been reported to have run away.  He explained that Flintshire now had a dedicated worker who met with the young people to find out where they had been and what they had been doing and to put a risk management plan around the individual child.  It also helped to build a picture as to where they were congregating together and where appropriate intelligence was shared with the Police.  The indicator showed that just under 75% of children had had an interview and data was now being collected to show those who had been offered an interview but declined to give a better indication.

            In response to issues raised by Councillor Ellis, the Senior Manager - Children and Workforce explained that they had continued to recruit Foster Carers through the pandemic and that targets would have been met but were affected by timing issues with the Panel meeting in April.  If the Panel had met in March, targets would have been met.

            He explained that in relation to the Family Group meetings, demand had increased during the pandemic - the target was to support 280 families and 382 families were actually supported.  Due to the increase in demand, work had been undertaken to expand the service.

            Child Protection was showing amber due to the fact that they were 1% away from target.  The Senior Manager - Safeguarding and Commissioning added that they were at 94.14% and the target was 95% and that quarter 3 coincided with the Christmas period which could be a challenging time to contact families.  The Chief Officer (Social Services) responded to the final point concerning the issues on a downward trend reporting that this was partly due to the additional pressures on the services due to the pandemic but performance needed to be maintained and they could not use this as a reason for everything.

            Councillor Gladys Healey questioned if the 75% of runaways were the ones that came back.  The Senior Manager - Children and Workforce confirmed that all runaways return but had to be classed as missing if they did not return at certain times, even if their whereabouts were known.  75% of them accepted an interview to talk about where they had been, the risks they might have been subjected to and the importance of sticking to boundaries.  The other 25% are the ones that declined the interview.

            The Chief Officer (Social Services) said that he would feed back the comments to the team that Councillor Mackie made about the ease to follow report and the Committee’s thanks to the SPOA Team in respect of how they dealt with the significate increase in demand to service.

The recommendation in the report was moved by Councillor Gladys Healey and seconded by Councillor Ellis.

RESOLVED:

That the report be noted.