By Fears that services could suffer as Council workers stay home
One concerned resident has spoken out over fears that the number of North East Lincolnshire Council workers still working from home is negatively affecting public services.
James Brooks spoke to BBC Radio Humberside after a Freedom of Information document showed that 846 council workers are currently working from home part-time despite the lockdown ending over 12 months ago.
He said he feels the level of service being provided by the council simply doesn’t justify the amount of council tax paid and suggested that the situation means essential services are being poorly managed.
According to information handed to Mr Brooks 428 members of staff are employed within Children’s Services.
Of this figure 364 are allowed to work from home for between 2-3 days per week.
Mr Brooks said: “These things need to be monitored and controlled and it seems that it isn’t being monitored. Staff aren’t communicating on a daily basis.”
In 2021 Department of Education commissioner Peter Dwyer CBE carried out a three-month review of Children’s Services following an Ofsted report which found the service ‘inadequate’ in all areas.
Mr Dwyer concluded that the report had caused ‘significant’ reputational damage and that many issues remained such as unallocated work, new teams leading to inconsistency and only 49% of families reporting that they see their case worker regularly.
The Ofsted report assessing the authority’s Children’s Services department found a “weak oversight of work, and risk assessment and management systems that should provide robust oversight of practice are ineffective.”
It said: “there are serious and widespread failures across the help and protection service. While improvements have been achieved in some discrete areas since the focused visits in 2019, too many children’s needs are left unaddressed.
“The quality of professional practice and management oversight is weak, and the service is insufficiently resourced. This is resulting in failure to protect children from harm and poor planning in respect of their needs and future care.
“Some children’s cases are closed or stepped down without risk and need being fully understood or addressed, leaving children at risk.”
Addressing the issue, Leader of the Council Philip Jackson said: “I certainly, as leader, encourage members of staff to be back in the office to maintain the services. I certainly haven’t had any complaints about the services at the moment.
“A lot of staff had to work from home, but they are moving back into the office and i am encouraging that.”
Jackson added that the council is “encouraging hybrid working, it isn’t always appropriate for the staff to be in the office.”
He continued: “There are individual cases where services are being adversely affected, increasingly across all sectors of the economy we are moving to hybrid working.
“We are continually improving our systems, we need to make sure we have enough staff in the office to deliver services.
“It’s about having that balance, and the appropriate number of staff in the office.
“I think part of the problem in Children’s Services, we are over reliant on agency staff, and quite a lot of those staff are in teams that aren’t based in North East Lincolnshire, the way we are addressing that is we just recruited 30 South African workers.
“We do know that as we get new social workers, they will be taking on cases and will be the majority of our staff, not as many agency workers.
“My point is, we need to make sure we can deliver council services effectively. I will be double checking as leader to make sure we have the staff in the office to deliver services properly.”
