The practice of agencies selling teams of social workers to local authorities for potentially hundreds of thousands of pounds for contracts lasting less than a year “could be stopped overnight with just a few tweaks to the law”, directors of children’s services say.
Responses to a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to all local authorities in England about the use of so-called “managed teams” to plug workforce gaps reveals that collectively 43 councils have been billed £41.1m over the last five years by agencies.
Bradford City Council has been using six managed teams since November 2020 which were due to stay in place until June 2022. In 2019/20 this cost Bradford £1.7m, increasing to £1.8m in 2020/21 and £5.5m in 2021/22 with the addition of “a small managed service team to support work in the leaving care team” which was set up in September last year.
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