Yesterday saw Croydon’s Director of Finance, Investment and Risk issue a Section 114 Notice which confirms that Croydon Council cannot balance its budget for 2020/21 and will now have to stop any expenditure that is not 'statutory’.
With this backdrop, I was due to attend the Corporate Parenting Panel with my senior colleague Cllr Maria Gatland yesterday afternoon. However, with just 45 minutes to go, we were advised that the meeting could not go ahead because none of the four Labour councillors were attending as they had chosen instead to attend a hastily convened Labour Group meeting. Meanwhile representatives from or for Social Care, Virtual School, Care Leaver, Foster Carers, the Looked After Children Nurse and Doctor team, Health Commissioners were simply told that they were no longer needed, as were some of the Looked After Children who join our meeting.
The Council acts as a Corporate Parent to all of its Looked After Children, which in September totalled 764 children. The Corporate Parenting Panel focuses on improving outcomes for children, monitors performance targets and priorities to ensure progress is on track, and promotes health, education and future opportunities for Croydon’s Looked After Children. The value for me of the Panel is hearing the voice and opinions of Looked After Children and Care Leavers as there is often a disconnect between the service that the children should be receiving and their actual lived experience.
Yesterday’s meeting was to have a focus on Healthcare. I intended to ask about the low rate of health assessments provided when children enter care - and I don’t know when I will get a second chance to do so. The Panel is supposed to meet 6 times a year. This calendar year we’ve only met twice. In terms of the municipal year (May to May), we have had 1 meeting despite being halfway through the year already. So it was disappointing that the Labour Cabinet Member for Children Young People and Learning, her Deputy, and two other Labour colleagues thought that it was more important to attend their own political Group meeting than to serve the interests of the children for whom we are Corporate Parents.
The Ofsted Inspection of June 2017 rated Croydon’s Children’s Services ‘Inadequate’. A lot of hard work from Council staff and the leadership of a new Executive Director for Children’s Services raised that rating to ‘Good’ in March of this year – except for ‘The experiences and progress of children in care and care leavers’ which was rated as ‘Requiring Improvement’. Since then the Executive Director has left and we’ve had just 1 Panel meeting. It’s almost as though the Administration isn’t overly concerned with raising the service to ‘Good’ for all of our Looked After Children and Care Leavers.
Cllr Gatland, the Conservative Shadow Cabinet Member for Children, Young People and Learning has written to the Cabinet Member to seek reassurance that the cancelled meetings will be reinstated so that we can carry out our responsibilities to this vulnerable group of children.
