Trust will go ahead says Northamptonshire Children's Commissioner

Northamptonshire’s Children’s Commissioner says handing the county’s children’s services over to an independent trust will still go ahead and is the right thing to do.

Andrew Christie – the Government’s official overseeing child protection services in Northamptonshire – says despite being halted for now the trust will be up and running before next Spring.

The trust’s creation has been hampered by early problems since it was first decreed by Government in May last year following another damning Ofsted inspection which rated the Northamptonshire service as inadequate.

The first children’s commissioner Malcolm Newsam resigned from the role just four months later, swiftly followed by the director of children’s services Sally Hodges and her deputy Jean Imray.

The coronavirus crisis has partly derailed the set up again and the original date of July is not going to be met. This has been coupled with the departure of the trust’s interim chief executive James Thomas who announced just one month into post that he would be leaving in July.

Mr Christie said the council had always known there was a possibility James Thomas could be offered a permanent role elsewhere, but had to ‘weigh up’ taking on an interim or not progressing at all.

He said: “The children’s trust is still right on course.

“Because of Covid 19 the council has had to understandably divert resources. We have agreed with the chief executive that the trust should be halted. But it is a temporary halt.

“None of us know when the crisis is going to abate, we all realise it is going to be an issue for some time.

“When we first went out to market we were in the middle of recruiting for a permanent appointment. We thought we needed to bring somebody in the interim to get the work under way. James Thomas was available – we knew that he was applying for a job at Tower Hamlets and it was a possibility we could lose him. We thought that at time, that would cause a relatively short gap before the permanent recruitment was able to start. Unfortunately, it is pretty clear that won’t happen due to Covid-19. (When covid happened) candidates were telling us they could just not leave the job they were doing at the moment, as they were all senior posts and key players.”

But despite questions from some about whether the trust is the right thing for Northamptonshire the commissioner is confident an independent trust is the best way forward after years of turmoil.

He said: “I am confident it is the right and it wil work. Children and young people have waited far too long in Northamptonshire and that is something we have got to change.”

A second round of recruitment for the chief executive will take place later this summer. The trust’s chairman Ian Curryer, will start in role next month (May).

The commissioner says he has seen improvements in the service since he arrived in October last year. He says the situation where hundreds of children who did not have an allocated social worker has now been resolved and improvements have started to be made in appointing permanent social work manager to lead the teams.

However there are still high levels of agency staff in the department, as the service has been hampered by its poor reputation aswell as the pay and conditions it has been offering to staff.

And there are still many unknowns about the trust.

Its budget is the great conundrum as it will be in set by the shadow councils for the two new unitaries which are due to be created next April. With local authorities warning the coronavirus crisis is dramatically hitting their budgets it is uncertain if another round of big savings will be coming local government’s way.

And even now there is a chance that the unitary reorganisation planned could be set back once again because of the pandemic situation, with government indicating it could be delayed once again if ‘safe and legal’ services cannot be set up in time.