Mr. Bernard Gloster:

The change to 55 from December to now is still within the maximum 250 agency staff I set for the agency after the conversion. We have never breached that figure of 250. In fact, we are staying at an average of around 210 or 211. I certainly do not intend to let that get out of control. The slight growth there is because agencies were able to give us available staff who wanted to work for a short-term period in a particular way or in a particular setting. The reason we had to increase that was because of what Ms Duggan mentioned regarding the significant impact of maternity leave, Covid during maternity leave and staff leaving. If you put all of that together, there is some pressure. While I would rather have maximum in-house provision when it comes to getting social workers for children, we will take them in whatever way we can most expeditiously get them.

The Chairman is 100% correct about the impact on services. Agency workers are very good but temporary agency staffing in a function like social work, except for the shortest period of time, does cause a level of disruption to continuity. The difficulty with that fundamentally, and children would often articulate this, is that children have to get used to somebody new again. They have to tell their story again and build that relationship again. That is the nature of the impact of turnover in a profession like social work. Like a lot of professions in the past decade, turnover is now a significant feature of it. It would be foolish to say there is not an impact.