Care target not being met

40 WEEKS TO GET VULNERABLE

LEICESTER City Council has admit- ted it is taking 14 weeks longer than it aims to bring vulnerable children into care.

When a child is at risk at home, the council can apply to become its legal parent.

The council aims to do this within 26 weeks, but some children are facing 40 week waits.

The 26-week target is “not currently realistic”, the Children, Young People and Education Scrutiny committee heard.

Caroline Tote, director of Children’s Social Care and Early Help at the authority, said: “I think there’s a misunderstanding that social workers can take children into care without an order. We can’t.

“We’re currently at just over 40 weeks, so really, really lengthy.”

She said the problem is repeated nationally, with even some authorities rated outstanding having similar procedure lengths.

“More recently, Covid has massively impacted because we moved the court system from face-to-face to virtual and in some ways that shortened some of the hearings, but in other ways it’s made it more clunky to set that up,” Ms Tote said.

“We’re moving now back to a hybrid model, so where parents can attend with the judge and some key people within the court, but the rest are virtual. So that takes longer.

“We’ve seen significant increase in the timescales for independent assessments, psychological assessments, even obtaining advocacy for the parents because of Covid, so that’s massively impacted nationally. “We were not doing great before, we’re doing even worse now.

“This is an issue around court capacity.

“In fact we’re about to lose two more judges for Leicester and Leicestershire so that is going to impact again.

“That is a national issue – we’ve got a shortage of judges.” Ms Tote said there are also differences in how local authorities up and down the country work that changes potential wait times.

She said: “One of the positive things for Leicester is that when we’ve done some analysis with some authorities and areas where it takes less time, so they’ve been significantly better than us, actually when you look at the cases they don’t achieve the permanence decision at the last hearing. So it’s a bit of a red herring.

“We are securing permanence more often with the care order because we’ve got it right.

“So while it might take longer, we’re not then having to come back to court later.

“That’s because we’re taking our time.”

She concluded by reassuring the committee that the team “was all over it” and had an action plan in place.

CHILDREN PLACED – REFLECTING PROBLEMS AROUND COUNTRY

We’ve seen significant increase in the timescales for independent assessments Caroline Tote