Council hoping for fresh start

Slough: Relations with former supplier 'soured'

Slough Borough Council is hoping for a fresh start after its ‘soured relations’ with the former supplier of children’s services in the borough.

Slough Children’s Services Trust was set up in 2015 and provided social care and support services to children and families until 2021.

The company become Slough Children First (SCF) last March when it came back under the control of Slough Borough Council.

At a council meeting on Monday, cabinet examined the annual business plan for SCF, presented by chief executive Andrew Fraser.

Leader of the council James Swindlehurst apologised to Mr Fraser if the council appeared still to carry ‘hostility’ towards the service.

He said the council was ‘once bitten, twice shy’ after its difficulties with the trust, which contributed to the council’s financial woes.

It generated a ‘relentless overspend’ and ‘never balanced its budget in its whole five years of operation,’ he said.

The council acknowledged the success of Slough having no inadequaterated services for the first time in 10 years – but stressed the importance of avoiding ‘Groundhog Day’ under the new service.

Cllr Robert Anderson, cabinet member for financial oversight, council assets and performance, noted that costs have increased out of proportion to caseloads for children’s services, and queried the legal costs in particular.

In 2021/22 budget, legal fees for the service were projected at £2.1million. For 2022/23, the hope is to bring that down to £1.5million.

Cllr Anderson said that the legal budget was once only in the hundreds of thousands of pounds and asked why it is costing so much more.

Mr Fraser explained that this is due to the increasing complexity of cases, causing ‘serious delays’ in the court system.

He said changes could be made in

terms of spending legal fees with ‘the right people’.

To further reduce costs, SCF is aiming to reduce its expensive reliance on agency staff.

Moving forward, it will be concentrating on ‘early help’ interventions for children with seemingly small problems at school or elsewhere that could escalate into a crisis.

Mr Fraser said this facet of the children’s service has been ‘underdeveloped for a number of years.’

SCF will also be focusing more on what happens outside of families, such as knife crime and exploitation.

Cllr Natasa Pantelic, cabinet member for social care, and Cllr Christine Hulme, cabinet member for children’s services, both raised questions about the equality data in the report.

They asked why there was not more detail about the impact on those with protected characteristics – since those from ethnic minorities are more vulnerable to both knife crime and exploitation.

Mr Fraser said the service would take this on board moving forward. It was agreed the SCF’s plan needed more ‘flesh on the bones’ for future drafts.

Max Caller, lead commissioner overseeing Slough council’s finances, said that it had been a ‘significant failure’ not to get this plan ready for the September cabinet meeting, when it was due. But he added that the silver lining of this delay was that the scrutiny panel could do ‘a detailed job’ and achieve a better outcome.

The paper is set to go to scrutiny from April to June.