Praise for turnaround in community service system

Aberdeen’s social work chief has praised staff for turning around the city’s community service system less than a year after it was criticised by a sheriff.

Local authority social work director Fred McBride hailed the improvement in the community service team after it was highly commended at a national awards ceremony.

Mr McBride had just taken the reins of the city’s beleaguered social work department last summer when Sheriff James Tierney ordered a senior council official to appear before him.

The sheriff demanded answers as to why someone had carried out just two-and-a-half hours of a 280-hour community service order, months after it was handed down.

The city council was forced to apologise for a “catalogue of errors” that had led to the blunder. The service had already come under fire in a highly critical Social Work Inspection Agency report the year before.

“It was one of the first things I had to deal with,” Mr McBride told the Press and Journal yesterday.

“Some of our quality assurance mechanisms and management of standards were not tight enough.

“In the last six months there has been additional investment of about £60,000. That can buy you another two task supervisors and with that you can take on another two squads.”

The service has just found out that two of its projects have received national recognition in the Scottish Government’s community service awards.

A tidy-up of Torry was runner-up and highly commended in the environmental category, while the Powis Gateway project came third in its section.

“It sends a really strong signal about the level of improvement we have made in the last year or so,” Mr McBride said. “It wasn’t just about tidying up parts of Torry, it was linked to the John Muir Trust (conservation initiative).

“It was a big group of men in that project who achieved that award, with three additionally achieving an SQA level four.

“Some of them said they would never drop litter again, they would never let their children do it, that they learned about local history and they had been to parts of Torry they had never been before.

“We have got quite a lot of evidence that the project has reduced offending behaviour.

“The objective is to come first in the awards next year.”