Agenda item 3 is a briefing on the joint report that I mentioned. Members have copies of the report, which was published only last week. I invite Audit Scotland to speak to the report—I believe that Caroline Gardner will do so.
Thank you, convener. The report is an extension of the main report on youth offending that we published last December. It provides information about performance throughout Scotland on some areas of risk that we identified in the original report—the supervision of children who offend, the submission of reports by the police and social work services to the children's reporter and the organisation of youth justice teams.
Thank you. The Audit Scotland team is now available to answer members' questions.
I want to ask Caroline Gardner for some information. I should declare that East Ayrshire Council is within my area of responsibility. Obviously, I am deeply concerned that it has failed in such an important way on the issue that we are discussing. Is there a link between the poor service by East Ayrshire Council and the number of complaints that we hear about the antisocial behaviour of young people?
I will answer the second point first. The Accounts Commission is about to launch its new audits of best value, under the Local Government in Scotland Act 2003. Those audits will, for each council, closely follow up concerns that have been identified through reports such as this one. They will consider the action planned and the progress made by each council. I will ask David Pia to answer the point on antisocial behaviour. He is the manager of the team that produced the report.
We did not analyse the relationship between the amount of supervision, the number of child offenders and the amount of crime. In other words, we were not considering the demand for services; we were doing an audit of how far existing statutory orders were being delivered. If you talk to people in East Ayrshire and the other council areas with the most problems, they will generally say that the demand for their services is higher and that their resources are lower. However, we did not study that as such.
Why is there such a huge difference between the quality of services for children and the much better quality of services for youths over the age of 16? Is it because of differences in the people who deliver the services? The number of vacancies for social workers is much lower for services for over-16s than it is for services for children. I am at a loss to understand why that should be.
Our best guess, from the evidence that we have, is that there are simply differences in the services that apply to the different groups. Children's social work has particular recruitment difficulties because of the stresses and pressures involved. A vicious circle is developing: it becomes harder to recruit, so it becomes harder to deliver good services, so it becomes harder to recruit. For over-16s in the criminal justice system, there is a national standard for the frequency of contact with social workers; there is no equivalent standard for under-16s in the reporter system. Councils may respond to that situation by delivering the statutory responsibility first. Other services may then develop gaps because priority is being given elsewhere.
Is the remuneration higher for social workers who deal with over-16s? Is that a factor?
No, there is no difference. There is a different funding arrangement for the services for adults—it is known as 100 per cent funding. Under that arrangement, the money allocated to councils for their services for adult offenders is based on the demand for those services.
Do we have the most up-to-date figures about the shortages of social workers in this area?
The figures that we have included in the report are for the end of 2002. The way in which they were collected and validated means that that is the most up-to-date information that we have. However, more figures are being monitored by the Executive at the moment.
I want to ask about the work that Audit Scotland undertook. Did Audit Scotland physically look at some of the files that you said did not contain details of visits or anything like that?
Yes. The appointed auditors in each council looked at a sample of files. In the small councils, only a small number of files were examined, but the auditors looked at up to 30 files in each council. We had designed a questionnaire; the auditors went through the files and collected information to answer the questions that we were asking. In addition to that study by the auditors, we undertook a separate check of 10 files in 10 councils to ensure a degree of consistency in the findings. The files were physically examined.
The word is about that the forms that councils had to complete were unclear and that the councils may have made mistakes in how they provided Audit Scotland with their returns—as soon as that information is available, I will provide you with it. That is certainly what East Ayrshire Council is trying to hang the matter on.
Where either the results looked very poor for a council or a council raised concerns with us, we went back in every case and discussed with them our findings and sought agreement on them. I hope that that addresses concerns about the results that we have reported.
Yes, it should be noted that the factual contents of reports have to be agreed before the reports are published.
Did you undertake any comparisons between the councils that were found not to be performing and those that were performing, to identify whether the amount of resources that they were prioritising for children's services was the root cause of the problem or whether the problem was due to other factors?
I will ask David Pia to expand on that. As I said before, we were examining whether the councils were meeting the recommendations of the orders that were produced by the children's reporter system. We did not go back and consider the resources that the councils had in place for children's services because, unlike the courts service, children's services are not funded to reflect demand. That is a matter for the council. Our starting point was the services that the children's reporter system had set out under its orders for the individual children under supervision.
We were asking how far the services were delivering what they are meant to deliver. If they were not delivering, we did not really study why, although the report refers to various factors that we believe require more attention. That is why we recommend that councils and the Executive should consider more closely the reasons for the problems.
What were those factors?
Staffing is obviously one factor.
Is the staffing issue one of recruitment or resources?
Both aspects are involved. In some places, all the posts cannot be filled; in other places, more posts are needed. Questions about the management of services arise, both at the more strategic level and at the front line. We found that many care plans are not completed, that many records are not kept properly and that there is a high turnover of staff. Those issues raise questions about the nature of local management, which is why we recommend that councils should consider the issue and that, because of the seriousness of the situation nationally, the Executive should be more closely involved.
Did some of the discrepancies arise as a result of different forms of quality control? Obviously, there are significant management failings, but are there discrepancies between local authorities on how the overall service is monitored and evaluated?
We did not examine that as such, but the fact that care plans are often not in place leads one to ask whether service quality is being monitored as it should be. Given that about a third of the children's files do not have care plans, it is safe to conclude that appropriate monitoring is not in place.
Will you remind me how the structures that are in place for monitoring should work if they are to work effectively? Is it time for a radical overhaul of the monitoring system?
The first responsibility is with local management. There are many pointers that raise questions about the overall quality of management but, as we did not study that issue directly, it would not be right to express a firm view on it. However, there are enough issues to raise questions, which is why we recommend that the Executive should consider the matter more closely.
Some parts of the report raise fundamental concerns about quality. Exhibit 6 on page 12 of the main report illustrates that only eight councils had care plans in more than 80 per cent of the files. Such findings should be of concern to the committee and to the councils involved. It is difficult to envisage how the children involved can be receiving the attention that they require when so many local authorities do not have basic care plans in place. Through best-value work and dialogue with the Executive, we intend to monitor some of the basic issues about the level of service that is being delivered.
Has any work been done to look at the councils that are not providing an adequate service and to examine the scale of the issues that they face? Are there reasons why those councils are not providing an adequate service? As you have indicated, the reasons for that may not necessarily be to do with staffing levels; there may be pressures on the service for a variety of reasons. Is it possible to make any link between the councils?
As Caroline Gardner said, we will go through the best-value audit and pick up the issues in relation to individual councils. Our recommendation that the Executive should examine the matter has been welcomed. The minister, Cathy Jamieson, last week welcomed the publication of the report. She said that she would take up the issues in the report with the chief executives of councils. I do not know precisely how the Executive plans to do that, but it would be helpful if it asked what is going on in those councils and whether there are certain characteristics that help to explain the difficulties.
I suppose that examining the indicators for deprivation would be among the factors that would be considered in looking at those councils.
Yes. Proper analysis of the reasons why the councils are not providing an adequate service would require that kind of information.
We said at our previous meeting that, as well as considering the number of available qualified social workers, we must examine the demands that are placed on them. Do you have any insights into the likely impact on this area of activity in particular of measures that are coming through the system as the result of legislation that has been agreed by the Parliament or of pending legislation such as the Antisocial Behaviour etc (Scotland) Bill?
As the committee discussed at its previous meeting, it is clearly necessary to examine what demands are being placed on people in addition to how well they are delivering one part of their work. We have not yet had an opportunity to step back and have that look across the range of social workers dealing with children and families. It is almost inevitable that factors such as the pressures on child protection work will have an impact on what is happening with young offenders and the work to prevent reoffending. Many other demands are coming through the system. We may be able to examine the issue in future, but the Executive should also investigate those issues when the legislation is being formed and put in place.
Another aspect of the report is the failure of police forces to deliver reports on time. Can you explain the background to that? What is the problem?
For several years, there have been agreed standards and targets for the submission of police reports to the children's reporter. Performance against those targets has been poor. Indeed, as the report points out, only one police force—Tayside—out of the eight has achieved the target.
Does that mean that Grampian police and the Northern constabulary might actually start to record the data that would be useful if we are trying to make progress?
I hope so. That is certainly the recommendation. As the Executive has acknowledged, the difficulty is that, although the police are members of the national monitoring group, not all the police forces are providing information.
Throughout the report, you indicate that councils are not meeting their statutory obligations. Although we know that responsibility for that situation falls to the chief executive of each local authority as the accountable officer, surely there must be a role for social work inspection. Notwithstanding how professionals are supervised, if they are not conducting their day-to-day work, we should work with the social work services inspectorate as well to try to persuade and cajole councils into accepting that they might well have to invest in and reorganise their children and families services. Have you received any input from the SWSI?
That matter will certainly fall within the remit of the new criminal justice inspection service. However, the existing SWSI is examining the broader issue of how it can provide assurance on and add value to professional practice questions. At the moment, that is not a large part of the inspectorate's work, but it is developing the matter even as we speak.
Although I recognise the importance of effective data collection and recording systems, I wonder whether there are concerns that any response to the report might overemphasise process at the expense of some of the wider managerial and professional practice issues that have been alluded to this morning. How might we guard against such an overemphasis?
That is not an either/or choice. As David Pia said in response to an earlier question, if no care plans are in place it is very hard to see how such multidisciplinary services can be planned and delivered effectively and how we will know whether they are achieving the results that they should be achieving. Although none of us wants to tie up professionals in unnecessary record keeping, we feel that getting the original planning and monitoring system working effectively is a prerequisite for ensuring that services work effectively in practice.
In that respect, people will find a great variation within individual councils and even within individual social work offices. Some cases are well handled and properly—not elaborately—recorded, whereas other cases are not dealt with properly. We are not suggesting that there is no good practice at all anywhere. Instead, we are highlighting the fact that although there is a high level of poor practice in some places, there is more or less an entirely good level of practice in other councils.
Is there evidence from councils where there is unevenness of service—where some of it is good and some of it is not so good—of their employing a system whereby they prioritise some cases and let others go on the back burner? Is that deliberate or accidental?
Most departments use some of kind of priority system and have criteria that in many areas are published. The difficulty is in implementing those criteria in a safe and acceptable way. The cases that we considered involved children with offending problems. Councils will often say that they recognise that certain children have needs that they should be tackling, but they judge that other children's needs are even more urgent and require more attention. One of the challenges nationally is how to ensure that sufficient quality resources are being directed at 15 or 16-year-olds who are offending. They are perhaps not the most serious offenders, but they come rather far down the priority list—you may say unsurprisingly—behind young children who are vulnerable in their homes.
I am minded to bring this item to a close as members have no more questions. I thank members for bringing up a wide range of issues. Under agenda item 7 we can discuss where we take our views on and concerns about the report. I thank the Audit Scotland team for giving such full answers to members' questions. Although we are running slightly late, I am keen to move on so that we might still fit in a break before we start to take evidence