Contribution
My Lords, through the introduction of a regulation-making power, Clause 19 allow the Government to take stronger action to alleviate the significant affordability and stability challenges that have arisen from the increase in the use and cost of agency workers in local authority children’s social care in England. The noble Baroness, Lady Barran, identified some of the progress being made in the staffing of children’s social care. I can confirm that the current level of agency use in the sector stands at 16.2%, a small fall on the previous year, but she is also right, of course, that this varies considerably from authority to authority.
What I would say about that 16.2% is that, in essence, more than one in eight of the people who are working in children’s social care do not have the long-term association with their employers that we would expect to see in any service where we were able to provide the training, the stability and the certainty about future costs that we would want. It is considerably higher than in similar sectors, whether in the health service or in education.
Agency work continues to be a considerable issue within children’s social care. That is not to say that there is not excellent work being carried out by individual agency social workers—I know from my previous experience in Sandwell Children’s Trust that there are many excellent agency workers. Nevertheless, the cost and stability issues that I have outlined remain serious for local authorities and those providing children’s social care. This clause ensures that while agency workers will remain an important part of local authority children’s social care, they will not become a long-term replacement for a permanent, stable workforce. It will allow the Secretary of State to introduce regulations on the use of agency workers in English local authority children’s social care services.
I accept that progress has been made since the introduction by the last Government of the statutory guidance relating to local authority children’s social care services, but that was limited specifically to social workers. We want to extend the framework beyond social workers to the wider local authority children’s social care workforce, including workers such as those delivering early intervention or family help.
A new phenomenon has come into the workforce, and particularly agency provision within children’s social care: that of project teams, where agencies provide not just individual workers but teams to respond to particular challenges. In doing that, partly through the associated management costs and partly through the range of different workers, there are even larger uplifts in the amount of money charged to local authorities. I have seen from personal experience that it is not unusual for social workers and other staff in those teams to be earning £50 an hour or upwards. We may well think that people who are doing this important work are worth £50 an hour, but that is a considerable and, some might argue, unaffordable premium over social workers and other workers who are employed on a permanent basis with teams.
There is a broader range of workers that we should cover here, and a requirement to strengthen some of the principles in the statutory guidance, both by widening it and by this legislative provision. We will of course work in partnership with stakeholders across the system, including agencies, to ensure that the proposals implemented are proportionate and effective. They will make clear to local authorities, the recruitment sector and agency workers what they should expect from one another, and the consistency that this brings to the market will benefit all parties. If we are able by doing this to reduce local authority spend on agency workers, that will allow local authorities to invest more in services supporting children and families and enhance the offer to permanent employees.
I take the broader point that one important way of solving this problem of agency workers is to ensure that those permanently employed, either as social workers or doing other work in children’s social care, get the rewards that they deserve, receive the training that they need in order to get the career satisfaction and progression that they would want, and are employed by local authorities and children’s trusts in ways that value them and provide them with the resources they need. All those things are important, and the Government are addressing them all, but that does not remove the requirement that we believe exists for a stronger ability to make regulations covering children’s social workers and to broaden the scope of those regulations, which is what this clause enables us to do.