Social services scrutiny to change

By Elgan Hearn, Local Democracy Reporting Service

Changes will be made to how councillors scrutinise the regular performance of Powys Council’s social services.

In September last year, the Powys County Council’s Health and Care Scrutiny Committee saw the introduction of monthly performance reports on both Adult and Children’s Social Services placed on the agenda.

However, these items remained secret to the press and public, as the reports were supposed to be reviewed and discussed in a confidential session towards the end of meetings.

At the committee’s latest meeting, chair Cllr Amanda Jenner (Conservative) said:  “I want to give the public an update on what was going to be an exempt item, which is our standing item to consider the monthly performance reports. As a committee we decided it wasn’t actually working that well as we often run out of time.

“Also, there’s so much documentation that we’re looking at and our questions are operational.

“So, we are going to set up two working groups one for adults and one for children’s that will consider and look at those on a quarterly basis offline and in a non-public setting.”

She added that councillors on the groups would be able to see if any themes emerged from the data that needs to be looked at in more depth.

“So that’s where we want to go with that,” said Cllr Jenner.

At the committee meeting in December, the cabinet members that cover both Social Services departments, were quizzed to find out if they read the performance reports and if they did, how they used the information. All while the actual reports remained confidential.

Referring back to the highly critical Care Inspectorate Wales (CIW) report into Children’s Social Services in 2017, Cllr Jenner said that this type of report was not available then and meant that senior councillors and staff could legitimately say that they didn’t know of the problems because they didn’t have the information to hand.

At the time Cllr Sandra Davies (Labour) the cabinet for children’s services said: “I look for anything that has changed and that comes through on the amber (risk traffic light system) and I ask questions on that.

“I have weekly meetings and if there is anything of concern they are highlighted to me.”

Cabinet member for adult services Cllr Sian Cox (Liberal Democrat) added: “I tend to look at all of it and have a think if anything stands out and ask questions.”