An growing variety of kids are experiencing exploitation in Cardiff, in keeping with a council report on the challenges dealing with social providers within the metropolis
There are growing numbers of youngsters with advanced wants and an growing quantity who’re experiencing exploitation in Cardiff, in keeping with the native council. Cardiff Council’s director of youngsters’s providers, Deborah Driffield, advised members of the council’s kids and younger folks scrutiny committee at a gathering on Tuesday, October 7, about a few of the main challenges confronted by the social care staff.
In October 2024 councillors had been advised the native authority was overspending on its funds by hundreds of thousands of kilos as a consequence of pressures on kids’s providers and training.
A council report on the efficiency of social providers in 2024-25 already predicts there will probably be an overspend of £3m within the funds for youngsters’s providers for month 4 of 2025-26. By no means miss a Cardiff story by signing as much as our every day e-newsletter right here.
Ms Driffield stated: “The most important stress on kids’s providers is the price of residential placements however really what we’ve seen over the past… 5 or 6 months for the primary time shortly [is] not solely the growing value however the enhance in precise numbers.
“We’ve now received a piece stream that we’ve pulled into place in a short time to begin attempting to grasp what’s induced that.”
She later stated one other massive challenge the service faces is “the actually growing demand and complexity round kids with further wants”.
She added: “That’s our different greatest space of overspend.
“It completely isn’t one thing that we’re not conscious of.
“Whether or not we’ll be capable to handle inside that funds we’re nonetheless reporting on that and doing all the pieces we will to scale back the overspend.”
Cardiff Council’s social providers annual report exhibits the variety of contacts to kids’s providers went down by 6% from 34,545 in 2023-24 to 32,339 in 2024-25.
Nonetheless it states the variety of contacts and referrals, and the complexity of the presenting points kids have, stays excessive.
One other report on the youngsters’s providers’ supply plan for 2025-26 exhibits a few of the fundamental points confronted by the council directorate embrace managing growing demand, sufficiency of appropriate placements for youngsters, and “growing numbers of youngsters experiencing exploitation which is exposing them to violent behaviour and is drawing a small minority of youngsters into violent prison behaviour”.
The report references the recruitment and retention of skilled social employees as a problem.
Ms Driffield stated staffing throughout the kids’s service at Cardiff Council has “seen extra churn than we might have preferred”.
She added: “We’re conscious that we’re not [as] aggressive as we’d prefer to be with another authorities that pay extra.
“We’ve simply accomplished our report back to ensure that we’ve the market complement in place and that it’s prolonged as a result of with out that we might lose so many employees as a result of pay is necessary.
“We’re different initiatives in the mean time… to try to entice extra skilled employees.
“We’ve carried out an enormous quantity of labor… when it comes to rising your individual and supporting these newly-qualified employees.
“Now we have a steady senior administration staff and a frontline administration staff, which we’ve by no means had earlier than.”
There have been positives to take from the evaluation of youngsters’s providers in Cardiff.
One report states a discount within the variety of kids taken care of over time is “evident” and work has began on a brand new initiative geared toward growing foster placement capability within the metropolis.
A household recommendation and help service referred to as early assist has additionally been built-in into kids’s providers at Cardiff Council with the hope of decreasing the necessity for intervention.
Council knowledge exhibits the variety of kids added to the kid safety register in Cardiff went down from 639 in 2023-24 to 634 in 2024-25.
The variety of kids who began to be taken care of in 2024-25 went down from 256 within the earlier 12 months to 239.
