The Corporate Director – Social Services and Wellbeing submitted a report to provide the Cabinet Committee with an update in respect of the progress made to increase the number of in house foster carers and placements within Bridgend, as well as highlighting significant achievements made during this financial year.

After a brief introduction to the report from the Head of Adult Social Care, the Group Manager – Children’s Regulated Services advised that Bridgend CBC had a clear corporate parenting responsibility to ensure that its Looked After Children (LAC) population wherever possible, and when it is safe to do so, are looked after within their local community where they will maintain family contacts and have their cultural, social, health and educational needs promoted.

She added that the Local Authority has access to a dedicated marketing resource to support recruitment of foster carers and ensure that marketing is appropriately targeted. It also has a Recruitment Officer based within the team to oversee the planning and management of assessments, both for general foster carers and managing the court timescales and assessments for relative foster carers.

She further added that the Local Authority currently had 38 approved relative foster carer households, and was focused towards working to secure permanence via legal orders other than care orders, thereby reducing the number of children placed with family who are categorised as LAC. Relative foster carers were carers who are approved specifically to look after named children within their family.

The Group Manager – Children’s Regulated Services stated that the Local Authority has 17 general in-house foster carers who are resident outside of the Local Authority’s boundaries, supporting the Council to offer in-house provision to children who have been identified as needing out of county placements.

The Local Authority had seen an increase over the past year of carers who wish to transfer from Independent Fostering Agencies (IFA’s) to the Local Authority service. This is reported to be due to the reputation of BFC and as a result of consistent positive CSSIW inspection reports. BFC also had a sound reputation amongst its foster carers for the excellent support it provides to carers from a dedicated team of professional social workers and a placement support worker. The IFA carers report identified that in BFC there was a better choice of placements and matching of children to households and, in some cases, better remuneration for the task they perform.

She reminded Members that in 2013 a decision was made to disband the Resolutions fostering service. Consequently existing Resolutions carers were encouraged to opt to transfer to any one of the four Resolutions partnership Local Authorities. Throughout the past year Bridgend CBC had been fortunate, through acting promptly and setting out clear guidelines and expectations in writing (for all the carers wishing to transfer), in being able to secure a significant number of the foster carers who were previously approved by the Resolutions Fostering service. Only one carer household out of 19 chose to transfer to another fostering agency (for whom they previously fostered). This has provided the Local Authority with a pool of experienced carers located within a number of Local Authorities across South Wales.

The Group Manager – Children’s Regulated Services confirmed that the practice in respect of relative foster carers had recently been revised, so that all potential relative foster carers were subject to a Unified Assessment (UA). This provided 3 recommendations in respect of three types of care provision and placement options, shown in bullet point format within paragraph 4.1 of the report.

She added that over the last twelve months, BFC had been successful in achieving a steady increase in the number of general foster carers approved, approving an additional 12 carer households offering a further 17 placements to children.

Similarly, over the last twelve months BFC had also been successful in achieving a steady increase in the number of general IFA foster carers who had transferred to BFC. During this financial year, 8 former IFA carers had transferred to BFC, offering 22 placements.

Since March 2014 there had been a net increase of 28 foster carer households offering an additional 55 placements.

Turning to the reports financial implications, the Group Manager – Children’s Regulated Services confirmed that paragraph 7.1 of the report showed savings made to date as a result of the transfer of a number of former IFA carers to Bridgend Foster Care, as well as further savings being realised as a result of an additional 10 children either moving from IFA placements to in-house foster care or as a result of children moving from residential care to foster care, or as a result of former IFA foster carers transferring to Bridgend Foster Care, often bringing their fostered children with them.

Unfortunately, the Group Manager – Children’s Regulated Services, added that although the savings made in respect of the above were welcomed, this would only reduce a potentially higher over-spend position, as a result of more LAC being placed in both in-house and external placements

RESOLVED:                That the Corporate Parenting Cabinet Committee noted the contents of the report and continued to support the valuable work that Bridgend Foster Care delivers to Bridgend’s LAC population