Councillors to be briefed on social services failures in secret

Senior council officers will tomorrow brief councillors in secret about two recent fiascos affecting the county’s children’s services.

A High Court judge recently found that Herefordshire Council had provided ‘woeful’ care for two half sisters and failed to put them up for adoption.

And in a second case, Mr Justice Keehan said twins were put up for adoption separately based on ‘erroneous’ information.

The council has apologised to those affected and fully accepts the judgments.

But many councillors were left fuming after first reading about them in the press.

Councillor Jim Kenyon, who raised concerns about children services at full council in October, said: “They ask us to be corporate parents and then they keep you in the dark.

“The worst of it is the councillor, who was the cabinet member overseeing the department at the time, is now the leader of the council. How the hell can that happen?

“What is going on with this council? Have decisions been made to have staff retrained, have they been sacked? Because you can get sacked for less than that.”

Council leader Jonathan Lester said it was right for the authority to apologise.

And said when he was the children’s wellbeing cabinet member he supported three independent external reviews of the services which all came back with overall positive feedback about progress and direction of travel.

The Independent group has called for an extraordinary meeting so that the failures can be probed publicly – but this has so far been ignored.

Plough Lane has been in information lockdown for several weeks with only senior members and group leaders being told about the damning cases which were about to hit the local authority.

And since the judgments were made public, elected members have also been told to refer any calls from reporters to the council’s press office.

A leaked email from chief executive Alistair Neill to children and families director Chris Baird revealed that he and his team will provide a full debriefing to all members followed by a question and answer session.

This will take place at 2pm tomorrow  behind closed doors at Shirehall.

“This will provide both good and transparent sharing of performance and practice information, as well as ensuring that children’s services hear and take on board members’ questions and concerns,” Mr Neill said in the email.

“The leader, the cabinet member and I will also be present.”