‘Insufficient social workers to meet need’ in town where Arthur Labinjo-Hughes died, probe finds

Updated on 28 February to include details of improvement notice issued to council

Social worker shortages in Solihull have meant children referred to local safeguarding services face long delays, with some waiting a month to be assessed, a multi-agency inspection triggered by the Arthur Labinjo-Hughes case has found.

The joint targeted area inspection (JTAI), carried out in January, found a “significant number” of children in need of help and protection in Solihull were waiting too long for their initial needs and risk to be assessed.

Its report, published today, also criticised Solihull’s safeguarding agencies for lacking “a cohesive approach to structuring and resourcing” the multi-agency safeguarding hub (MASH).

The JTAI said Solihull’s local safeguarding children partnership (LSCP) did not have a “clear understanding of the effectiveness” of the MASH. At the time of the inspection, “there was not sufficient social work capacity in the MASH to deal effectively with presenting need”, it added.

It said the number of health and police partners in Solihull’s MASH also remained “insufficient” to deal with demand, fuelling “drift and delay” in decision making to reduce risk for children.

The Department for Education has asked Solihull’s government-appointed adviser, Gladys Rhodes-White, to agree with partners how it will make the improvements highlighted by the JTAI and report back to it every six weeks.

Ministers have asked the LSCP for sight of its improvement plan and are considering what further support they can provide to the partnership.

Arthur case compounds ‘systemic’ recruitment challenges

The government commissioned the JTAI, alongside a broader national review into Arthur’s case, in December, when the six-year-old’s stepmother was convicted of his murder and his father was convicted of manslaughter.

During the trial it emerged that social workers had seen Arthur twice, but identified no safeguarding concerns, in the weeks before his death in June 2020, as the first Covid-19 lockdown was coming to an end.

The JTAI report noted that the coronavirus pandemic had placed “additional demands and pressures on the MASH”, but said the issues the inspection had identified were “long term and systemic”. It warned that decision making within the MASH was, for a “significant minority” of children, over-optimistic and lacking in professional curiosity.

“The current MASH workforce is committed and knowledgeable and dedicated to meeting the needs of children,” the report said. “However, staff face immense pressure to meet the daily demand, and this reduces their ability to respond swiftly to all concerns for children.”

The local authority had faced longstanding difficulties in ensuring there were enough social workers in the MASH, with attempts to improve this during 2021 having only limited impact, the JTAI found. It added that safeguarding concerns raised by Arthur’s case, which caused national outcry, compounded problems as they “made social workers highly reluctant to work in Solihull either on a permanent or agency basis”.

Solihull council had since, in partnership with the DfE, arranged for additional teams of agency social workers to join the MASH from the end of last month, the inspection report said. “It is imperative that this capacity be provided and sustained,” it added.

Learning from serious incidents ‘not shared effectively’

The JTAI report instructed leaders of the LSCP to “take urgent action” to understand and identify the initial needs and risks of children presenting to Solihull’s front door services, including ensuring that there is sufficient multi-agency capacity within the MASH to meet children’s needs promptly.

It also said child protection investigations needed to be improved, with not all agencies being invited to or engaging with strategy meetings or other information-sharing forums.

The report said the LSCP must ensure practice, and its impact for children involved with the MASH, was robustly audited. It added that the right agencies must be represented in all the LSCP’s activities and that the partnership must have sufficient resources to carry out its statutory functions.

The report noted that in 2021 the LSCP had appointed an independent scrutineer, demonstrating its “willingness to listen to challenge”. But it said that until recently this had not been focused enough on the work of the MASH.

Elsewhere, the JTAI investigation found that learning from significant incidents, including from Arthur’s death, was “not shared effectively” with the local workforce by the partnership.

“The LSCP partners completed a rapid review [following Arthur’s murder] in July 2020,” it said. “Some learning points were identified; however, this was not a comprehensive list of learning points that were present in the information available at that time.”

LCSP: ‘We are making improvements’

The LCSP’s independent scrutineer, Steve Cullen, said the JTAI report made it clear that “there are areas that need to improve”.

“The partnership needs to better understand the lived experiences of children in Solihull and individual organisations need to make improvements to the way that they respond to children – we haven’t waited until the report to do this, work has already begun,” he said.

Cullen said the council had created a multi-agency improvement board with an independent chair to support, oversee and challenge partner organisations with responsibility for safeguarding children on their progress in making the necessary improvements.

He said that staff in Solihull were under immense pressure and all the safeguarding partners had worked together to increase the number of staff working within the MASH.

“On behalf of the safeguarding partners I want to provide assurance that we have taken on board all of the comments from the inspectors and we committed to work together to improve the way we protect children in Solihull and to do everything we can to ensure positive outcomes for our children and young people,” he said.

Solihull council leader Ian Courts said the authority recognised there were areas for improvement and had already increased its number of social workers.

“The new improvement board will support, oversee, and, importantly, challenge partner organisations with responsibility for safeguarding children, on their progress in delivering an updated improvement plan,” he said.

“We have recruited an independent chair, Penny Thompson CBE, to begin the work of improving safeguarding in the borough without fear or favour. This means we can get on with improving our safeguarding practices and respond to the JTAI recommendations.”

Council ‘must improve’ by end of year

The Department for Education issued an improvement notice to the council following the JTAI report, instructing it to work with Rhodes-White to formulate a written statement of proposed action by 30 May and to deliver on these improvements by 31 December 2022.

“Should the council be unwilling or unable to comply with this improvement notice, or should ministers not be satisfied with the council’s progress at any stage, ministers may choose to invoke their statutory powers of intervention to direct the council to enter into an appropriate arrangement to secure the improvements required in children’s services,” it warned.

Police told to improve information system

The JTAI criticised other agencies involved in safeguarding children in Solihull, particularly West Midlands Police, which it said needed to take urgent action to improve the quality of information held on its ‘Connect’ crime records management system.

It said the police must make sure the links to connected individuals were present and accurate, and reduce multiple records held against the same person, so that risk to children can be clearly seen, recognised and shared when appropriate.

West Midlands Police said in response that its Connect system was introduced in April 2021, after Arthur’s death, to enable it to combine multiple information management systems into one in an effort to improve how it managed data.

“Since then work has continued to improve our ability to bring relevant information together and enhance the quality and management of information available to help us identify and manage risks more accurately and improve our ability to prevent and investigate crime,” the force said in a statement.

Children’s minister Will Quince, care minister Gillian Keegan and safeguarding minister Rachel Maclean wrote in a joint statement that Arthur’s death served as a “daily reminder of the urgent need for all the agencies tasked with protecting vulnerable children to work together”.

“That’s why we commissioned this joint inspection of services in Solihull, which has identified two clear areas where priority action is needed,” they said.

“Each agency – police, health and children’s services – has an equal duty in this work and we are writing to all three to make clear our expectation that they participate fully in producing and delivering on a written statement of action.”

The national review into Arthur’s case – now also covering the learning from the murder of Star Hobson – is due to report in May.