Sunderland slashes £7million agency staff social worker team down to just one staff member

Recruitment problems over several years saw the city spending more than £7million a year at one point to make sure there were enough staff to deal with Wearside’s most vulnerable families.

But children’s services chiefs now say they have a full complement of permanent workers, with just a single exception.

“We’re now down to one agency member of staff for the whole organisation,” said Martin Birch, director of Social Care at Together for Children (TfC), which runs children’s services in Sunderland.

“If you recall, in 2017/18 the expenditure from the council at that time was in the region of £7million for agency staff.

“We now only have one agency staff in place and that is important for a number of reasons.

“The pressure on the taxpayer is massively reduced, but probably more importantly [it also means] we have permanent throughout our organisation, from senior managers to social workers, so we’re able to deliver a better service to our children and families.”

Birch was speaking at a meeting of Sunderland City Council’s Children, Education and Skills Scrutiny Committee, which was held by videolink and broadcast via YouTube.

TfC was formed to run children’s services for Sunderland City Council following a damning Ofsted report in 2015.

During its first year in business, 2017/18, it had to pay for 167 temps at a cost of £6.14 million – estimated to be £2.05m more than if they had been employed as full time staff.

The previous year (2016/17) the bill for agency staff in the city had been £1.5 million higher.

According to Birch, another benefit of more permanent staff on roll had been more time for social workers to dedicate to the children and families under their care.

He added: “Our case loads have also reduced and we’re now looking at a case load of 16 or 17 [per social worker].

“When I started with Together for Children in 2018 it ranged from 30 to 35, so that is a significant reduction in the pressure on our social workers, which means we can deliver a better service.”

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