Top council official warns of social care crisis

Alec Doyle, local democracy reporter

A council’s senior head of Children’s Services has warned it is in the middle of a social care crisis.

Over the last five years the budget for children’s social care has tripled from £15 million to a projected £45 million at the end of this financial year.

But Children’s Services boss Rhian Thomas told councillors increasing poverty in Wrexham and cuts to drug, alcohol and mental health services mean the demands on the system are the biggest she has seen in her 18-year-career.

Councillors on Wrexham’s Safeguarding, Communities and Wellbeing Scrutiny Committee were examining the social care budget for 2024/25, which currently has a predicted £6.9 million overspend.

Spending

Plaid Cymru group leader Cllr Marc Jones raised concerns about the ever increasing spending in children’s services in particular and asked what was being done to stop children being taken into care in the first place.

“In terms of children’s social care we’ve had this crisis for five years. I looked at the budget for children’s services five years ago it was just £15m,” he said.

“The council has been putting huge amounts of extra money in but it’s not stemming the demand, it’s just meeting the demand. How do we prevent children coming into care?”

Ms Thomas said her department was working as hard as it could to focus on prevention – which would save money and deliver better outcomes for vulnerable children in Wrexham – but said that unprecedented societal pressures were driving ever more extreme challenges for children and families.

Demand

“The demand on the service is the biggest I’ve seen in my 18-year career,” she said. “Low level referrals have fallen but what we are seeing is the level of harm that needs to be assessed through the court process is the highest we’ve seen.

“That is very much a societal issue due to the cuts that have been made to drug and alcohol services for adults and waiting times for mental health services for adults.

“The poverty line for parents is increasing and we’re ending up with situations that escalate far too quickly, a depleted system that is unable to identify children in need early and a school system that since Covid is under extreme pressure with the additional needs of children.

“In north east Wales we have the highest levels of neurodivergency waiting times in North Wales. That means there are a number of children out there with unmet needs around things like autism and ADHD.

“As a result there are children at home, on part-time timetables or exclusions from school because their schools can’t meet their needs. They don’t have a diagnosis so we don’t know what their needs are or how to meet them.

“Children’s services then have to come in to try and resolve the issues, meaning a number of children come into care with significant behavioural issues that go straight into residential care. It’s a significant financial burden and it isn’t always right for that child but it’s the only resource we have to commission.

“We are also currently seeing an increase in the number of children at risk of being exploited under modern slavery who need residential or out-of-county placements.

“That costs a lot of money and we don’t get great outcomes. What we actually need to do is make the community here safer for them. We have to ensure we get in the right services that are going to work and provide resilience within our communities.

“Wales has always had a higher number of children coming into care statistically compared to the rest of the UK. We have higher levels of child poverty than the other Home Nations. That is something that needs to be addressed by Welsh Government.

“There’s been a 10-year programme from Welsh Government to reduce looked-after children numbers and that hasn’t worked. Children’s social care and preventative services funding has been so tightly controlled that local authorities haven’t been able to adapt to what they need based on their areas of multiple deprivation.”

Initiatives

Ms Thomas did point to a number of initiatives that the wider social care team was working on to try to shift towards a prevention-based approach, but said it would take years to see real results.

“Prevention work has started to stem the flow,” she said. “We’re investing in our edge of care preventative services – those that work with children on the verge of going into care. Without that the number of children going into care would be much larger.

“We have our Multi-Systemic Therapy Package and we’ve just launched the Family Integrated Transitions Package (MST-FIT). They work with children with significant behavioural or mental health challenges to try to keep them at home or get them back home.

“We’re about to launch the next phase of that, MST-CAN (for Child Abuse and Neglect) working with families where domestic abuse, drug and alcohol or mental health issues place children at risk of significant harm from parents to reduce those risk factors.

“Two years ago we launched the Information Advice Portal for families and the Wellbeing Hub has become a real all-age hub providing support for mother and toddler groups, autism groups and dementia groups for carers and young carers.

“Our Together Achieving Change (TAC) team is also working to alleviate demand management. But these initiatives need two or three years to really start having an impact.

“We’ve got to move away from fixing the problems to empowering communities to resolve them and giving them the tools so that people don’t become dependent on our preventative services.”

Councillors agreed to create a Task and Finish Group to focus departments across the council on improving intervention and reducing children moving into care – work it will ask the Welsh Government to fund.

“It’s really important that we don’t just say this is a social services problem and focus on social services coming up with all the answers,” said Cllr Jones.

“Education suffers when this isn’t right and so does health, so hopefully they will contribute to this.

“If you have a better society, you have fewer kids in care. It sounds incredibly simplistic but it really is that simple. If we have a better, healthier, wealthier society we don’t have these breakdowns in communities and families.

“Those budgets should be going into building up resilience, well paid jobs, good services and instead we’re having to firefight and that’s incredibly expensive. It frustrates the hell out of me.”