Michael Gove strips council of child protection powers

Children’s services in Doncaster will be ‘spun out’ into staff-owned trust after series of damning reports
A council has been stripped of its powers to provide child protection by the education secretary, Michael Gove, after the latest in a series of damning reports found its services could not overcome a persistent culture of “failure and disillusion”.

Children’s services in Doncaster, south Yorkshire, will be “spun out” into a staff-owned, not-for-profit trust independent of the council, while strategic oversight for the service will be provided by a commissioner appointed by the secretary of state.

The creation of the trust, expected to be up and running by April 2014, is thought to be the first time an entire children’s social services department has been removed from local authority control in this way.

The move follows the publication on Tuesday of a government-commissioned report by Prof Julian Le Grand, which concluded that repeated efforts to improve the council’s persistently poor safeguarding services had failed, and that the council needed to make “a decisive break with the past”.

The report said repeated reorganisations and changes of management had “promised much but delivered little”. Doncaster has gone through six directors of children’s services in the past eight years, and four council chief executives since 2009.

A series of official reports have been published into Doncaster’s children’s social services since 2005, many of which, the Le Grand report points out, identified a failure of the council to get a grip on safeguarding, despite relatively generous funding.

“Fundamentally the problem seems to be one of culture: there is a culture of failure and disillusion that pervades the service and that serves to obstruct every attempt at reform,” the report concludes.

The education secretary said in a letter to Doncaster’s elected mayor, Ros Jones, that he agreed with the Le Grand report’s conclusion that the council’s safeguarding services “could only be delivered through radical change”. Gove said he agreed with the report’s recommendations.

Doncaster’s children’s social services gained notoriety in 2009 following an incident in which two young boys from the nearby village of Edlington were sadistically tortured by two brothers known to social workers. A series of reports found the incident was preventable but safeguarding failures meant the council had failed to act. The brothers were sentenced to indefinite detention in 2010.

A report published by Lord Carlile in November 2012 found Doncaster had “failed to co-ordinate any realistic attempt to address the problems” caused by the brothers, who had been placed in foster care by Doncaster and who had demonstrated a long history of violence and antisocial behaviour.

Although the Labour-controlled council argued that it had made improvements in recent months and should keep the service in-house, Le Grand concluded the way forward was to make children’s social care independent of local authority control so it could develop “free of the constraints of corporate bureaucracy”.

It said: “There needs to be a line drawn under the historic failure: a separation that permits the development of a new culture – one of development, improvement and innovation, instead of one of frustration, disillusion and stagnation.”

The Le Grand report considered outsourcing Doncaster’s safeguarding services to the private sector, but noted that there were no companies with the relevant experience. Instead, Doncaster’s existing children’s social workers will be transferred to a Community Interest Company, a legal form used by social enterprises that prevents the company’s services or assets being sold off. Staff will transfer to the trust on standard local government terms and conditions.

The trust will be set up for a 10-year term, with a review point after five years.

However, the council will retain control of its school services, meaning that one of the central tenets of social services reform in recent years – that education and children’s safeguarding should be integrated – will be unpicked.

Andrew Webb, president of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, warned that there were potential dangers in spinning out a core service outside the democratic and management control of local government. “Any new arrangements must be fully engaged with the wider work of the local authority to ensure that potentially negative fragmentation of services does not occur,” he said.

Bridget Robb, chief executive of the British Association of Social Workers (BASW), said the move offered potentially innovative scope for improvements.

“BASW has always been supportive of new ways of providing services but we will only see genuine progress when social workers are released from their desks and given more time with children and families who need support.

“We hope this is a genuine innovative step. Simply mirroring existing local authority structures and imposing the same old bureaucracies under a new title will not do anything to improve the current situation in Doncaster”.

Craig Dearden-Phillips, founder of Stepping Out, a consultancy which specialises in “spinning out” NHS and local government services into social enterprises, said: “As a response to endemic failure, we welcome the creation of a new entity with a clear local focus and ownership. It is a very attractive alternative to externalisation or any new council-owned organisation”.