Children's social services in Birmingham damned in new report

Oct 6 2009 by Paul Dale, Birmingham Post

New senior management has been put in place since the end of last year and the council’s controlling Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition has poured at least £100 million additional money into social services since 2004. But Coun Clark said more money would be required in the short term.

In February this year, Birmingham children’s services was placed under special measures by the government and ordered to work to an improvement plan. The decision followed the deaths since 2004 of at least 18 children in the city who were known to social workers, including Toni-Anne Byfield who was shot after the council allowed her to visit her drug-dealer father.

Coun Clark (Con Quinton) said: “After some temporary progress in children’s services we always seem to fall back. We are not getting sustainable improvement. We have had under-performance for many, many years.

“We will robustly ensure that the timescales we have set for these improvements will be met.

“We haven’t spun anything or hidden anything. We have set out what we found.”

MPs reacted angrily to the report, with Labour’s Khalid Mahmood demanding that responsibility for running children’s services be passed from the council directly to the government.

Mr Mahmood (Perry Barr) said council officials had demonstrated they were incapable of helping children at risk of sexual and physical abuse.

Yardley Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming, a family rights campaigner, said: “This report confirms there is a lot of really bad practice going on.

“Eighteen children have died in Birmingham in the past four years. It is not a question of how quickly social workers can make a decision, which the governments seems to think is important, it is more a question of the quality of the decisions being made.”