Cllr Linda Thomas - "Doing It For The Kids"

This is the text of a talk given at the Heaton & Lostock Labour Party's Branch Meeting on Wednesday 14th June 2006 by Cllr. Linda Thomas, Deputy Leader and Portfolio Holder for Children's Services on Bolton Council.

Before Linda began John congratulated her on behalf of the Branch for becoming Deputy Leader of the Council as a result of our excellent results in the local elections.

She began by saying that Children’s Services have been completely reorganised, the idea being, from the Victoria Climbié enquiry, to ensure that people across departments work together effectively.  There has been a lot of change and we still have to do a lot because the authority has 50% fewer Children’s Social Workers than needed, with ~400 children being looked after, the majority in foster care.

There were problems in the past with recruiting foster parents in Bolton as they were paid less than in neighbouring authorities. There are private organisations coming in to care for children but they cost up to £800 per week, more than twice the amount that Bolton pays to foster carers. Each time a child is cared for outside the borough the cost is £200,000 per year.

Linda continued, saying that the various departments have also been physically reorganised and a single new department set up; this was a government dictat.  The previous Director of Education is now Director of Children’s Services.The organisation seems to work well at the top but has not yet bedded down at “the coal face”.

The former Child Protection Board is now the Health and Wellbeing Board and is the body that is supposed to make sure that no more Victoria Climbiés occur. She said that there are quite a lot of young runaways in the town and there is a group of voluntary sector workers from a church organisation working with them from an outreach centre on Schiffnell Street. Most of the young people are around 14 years old. Additionally, an information sharing system has been set up aimed at making sure that children needing help don’t “fall through the net” and it really seems to work.

Linda was of the opinion that the changes represent the biggest shake up in social services for more than 30 years and are a big step in the right direction. It’s a much better system and is beginning to show results.

Linda also spoke about Sure Start. It had been claimed that this initiative was failing but, in fact, the assessment of it had only been carried out 18 months after the start of the programme and it has ten years to run. She considered it much too early to make an objective assessment. So far the scheme has tackled and helped those families who have come to it for help and it has been successful, in her opinion. The next phase is more difficult because it involves working with those who need help but are not prepared to come forward and ask for it.  In some cases they could need persuading to accept the help on offer.  Generally these are families with much bigger problems and an outreach programme will be the only way to work with them.

Anne asked about the care that will be needed for the children of parents from the eight EU Accession States once they are eligible for help.  She said that, at present, even if the Council can only monitor and record the needs of these people, it should be done.  Any information from such an exercise should be passed on to Gary Titley.

Linda spoke about the positive works being undertaken with Somali refugee women who want to learn English.  Anne said that there are a lot of Eastern European workers who don’t have access to help of any kind, for the next few years, at least.

Graham asked what had happened to the rest of Social Services and Education.

Linda replied that there is a separate Adults' Department and this has been split into two with Margaret Clare dealing with all the Adult Social Services/Education issues.

Graham responded by asking what happens at the basic family level?  Would it be the case that the children of a family in care would be visited by one Social Worker and the adults by another?  It seemed that that was the case.

Joyce asked about runaway children.  Who has reported them as runaways, where do they live?

Linda said that a lot of them live on the streets, especially those who stay locally.  As previously stated, there is a church group trying to help them, care for them and, where possible, re-integrate them with their families.  There are also Educational Social Workers whose work is with the schools to reduce and help prevent truancy.

Terry asked about residential homes.  Linda said that the big, impersonal places have now gone and have been replaced by much smaller “family units” with just two or three children.  The Department is now trying to set up slightly larger homes which will take groups of maybe four children, but there are problems getting suitable properties from Bolton at Home.

Terry also asked about help being given to grandparents who are often the carers of children with “absent” parents.  Linda didn’t know but thought that probably not very much help is being made available.

Anne asked about the extent of foster caring amongst the BME (black, minority and ethnic) community.  Linda said that there has been a great deal of fostering in the BME community and it was even the case that there are more people willing to be foster carers than there are children needing care.  It seems to be a great success story.

After a short general discussion the Chair thanked Linda for her talk, the members for participating in the discussion and Leilia for hosting the meeting and for her hospitality.  He declared the meeting closed at 9:35 pm.

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