13. The Role of Elected Members and Senior Officers of
the Council
In the early years there seems to have been a prevalent denial of the existence of
child sexual exploitation in the Borough, let alone its increasing incidence and
dangers. By 2005, it is hard to believe that any senior officers or members from the
Leader and the Chief Executive downwards, were not aware of the issue. Most
members showed little obvious leadership or interest in CSE for much of the period
under review apart from their continued support for Risky Business. The possible
reasons for this are not clear but may include denial that this could occur in
Rotherham, concern that the ethnic element could damage community cohesion,
worry about reputational risk to the Borough if the issue was brought fully into the
public domain, and the belief that if that occurred, it might compromise police
operations.
For much of the time, senior officers did little to keep members fully informed of the
scale and seriousness of the problem, on occasion telling members they believed it
was exaggerated. In the early years a small group of frontline professionals from the
Council, the Police and Health worked together on CSE, both on individual cases and
on issues such as multi-agency procedures. They alerted senior staff to the scale of
the abuse but were met with disbelief and left with little management support for the
good work they were trying to do. There are reports that senior staff conveyed that
sexual exploitation and the ethnicity of perpetrators should be played down. This
seemed to be reinforced by the Police. The source of this attitude cannot easily be
identified. Concern about the resources CSE could consume; greater priority given to
the protection of younger children; professional jealousies, and personal attitudes of
some Council staff and the Police towards the girls involved have all been cited as
reasons for the failure to address the seriousness and scale of the problem.
The prevailing culture at the most senior level of the Council, until 2009, as described
by several people, was bullying and 'macho', and not an appropriate climate in which
to discuss the rape and sexual exploitation of young people. From late 2009, the Chief
Executive and the Lead Member took a strong personal interest in tackling child
sexual exploitation.
13.1 This chapter examines the leadership and management contribution of elected
members and senior officers of the Council during the period 1997 - 2013, and how
their actions may have impacted on the way in which CSE was handled within the
Borough.
The Chief Executives
13.2 From 1997 to date, there were five chief executives of the Council, plus one other
who 'acted up' in the role for brief periods. All were interviewed in the course of the
Inquiry. Three issues were common to all their statements. These were:
a) that the overriding priority of the Council for much of that time was economic
regeneration and addressing unemployment;
b) that the Council rarely had enough resources to meet the needs of its population;
and c) that the service priority for improvement in the earlier years was education, and
particularly schools.
13.3 The two chief executives in post until 2000 could recall nothing about CSE being an
issue during their tenure.
13.4 The Chief Executive (2001-2003) described himself as 'genuinely shocked and
surprised' at what had emerged in Rotherham. He had no recollection of it being a
major issue. His memory of the Risky Business project was also slight, regarding it
as being on the margins of the Council's activity. He did recall that the Home Office
research and report were treated as 'anecdotal, using partial information and not
methodologically sound' and that the Police were very angry about it.
13.5 His successor (2004-2009) was aware of Risky Business and the presentations that
were made to Council members and others. Taking account of the advice he
received, he recognised that there was a problem of CSE in Rotherham but he had
no reason to believe that the problem was greater than anywhere else. He had a
vague recollection about the 'Task and Finish' group, chaired by the Council Leader.
He did not recall hearing of Angie Heal 's reports in 2003 and 2006. He was the first
chair of the Rotherham Children's Safeguarding Board, for a period of 18 months, but
CSE did not feature much in the Board's work at that time. He described tensions
amongst the main agencies, mostly between the NHS and children’s social care.
There were stark differences in thresholds for intervention, in which CSE was not
mentioned as a priority. A main focus of his time in office as Chief Executive was to
improve external partnership working, which he believed had been achieved by 2009.
External partnership had been 'poor' with the Council perceived as overbearing and
too dominant. He believed that relations with the Police, and other agencies, had
improved markedly during his five years. He could not recall his Director of Education
raising concerns with him in 2004 about the police response to problems in
secondary schools, as referred to below.
13.6 The present Chief Executive took up post in October 2009. He reported that at the
time of his appointment, CSE was not mentioned by members as one of the key
challenges he would face. Nor did the previous Chief Executive alert him to the issue.
Nor were other major problems such as the Council's budget crisis raised. The
Ofsted report that led to the Government putting the Council's children’s safeguarding
services into 'intervention' in December 2009 did not specifically mention CSE. He
knew about it in the context of safeguarding, and Operation Central. He also became
aware of the issue at the time of the murder of Child S, when the senior investigating
police involved were adamant that it was not linked to CSE, but was an honour
killing. That was the message that the Council Leader followed. The next relevant
event for him was Operation Chard, in which there were 11 arrests but no
prosecutions.
13.7 His own early assessment was that the Council was not self aware or willing to face
all of the problems it had. The approach generally was 'not to rock the boat'. When he arrived, he thought that the whole of children’s social care seemed to be in denial
about its problems. Several people confirmed that the Chief Executive took a direct
interest in the change and improvement process required in the Children and Young
People's Service from 2010 onwards. Several managers described the Chief
Executive, the Lead Member and the Executive Director of Children's Services as
having provided excellent support during a difficult period.
Children and Young People's Services
13.8 From 1997 to 2005, there was a Department of Social Services in the Council.
Following legislation, children's and adult social services were split, and children's
social care was combined with education, to form a Department of Children's
Services. There was one Director of Social Services in post from the late 1990s until
2005, and two subsequent Directors of Children's Services, the second of whom is in
post at the time of writing. All were interviewed for the Inquiry.
13.9 From 2004 to 2009, there was one Director of Safeguarding. From 2009 to date,
there have been four post holders, with a fifth appointed to take up post from August
2014.
13.10 All of the above were interviewed for the Inquiry with the exception of one of the
Directors of Safeguarding.
13.11 From the late 1990s, there was an increasing knowledge and awareness of CSE
amongst a small number of frontline staff. The multi-agency Key Players Group was
set up to maintain an overview of the situation and continued until 2003. It was
chaired by the ACPC Child Protection Co-ordinator. They discussed individual cases
and also tried to map networks of perpetrators from available intelligence. None of
the minutes of meetings of this group have survived, as referred to previously in this
report.
13.12 We spoke to some members of the Key Players Group, and gained the impression of
dedicated professional people who understood the severity of the problem and were
not listened to. They drafted the first set of inter-agency procedures for CSE, which
were adopted by the Area Child Protection Committee. They had high hopes that this
recognition was going to lead to senior people in their agencies giving the issue more
attention and more resources. It did not. 'From then on, it all seemed to go
backwards. You were made to feel you were making a fuss about these girls,’ said
one member. There was general disbelief in the problem they described. Senior
managers 'slimmed down' the membership and revised the remit, and another
opportunity was lost for the agencies concerned to confront the true scale of the
issue and give it the support it needed.
13.13 In 2001-2002, the Director of Education (2001-2005) was one of the first senior
officers to raise concerns about CSE with the Police. The heads of three secondary
schools had told her of their concerns about young girls being picked up at the school gates by taxi drivers and their suspicions were that this was for the purpose of abuse.
Police watched the schools in unmarked cars for a period of time but the problem
persisted. She described raising this three times with the Police at a senior level. On
the last occasion she described how she was shown a map of the north of England
overlaid with various crime networks including 'Drugs', 'Guns', and ' Murder'. She was
told that the Police were only interested in putting resources into catching 'the ring
leaders' who perpetrated these crimes. She was told that if they were caught, her
local problems would cease. She found this an unacceptable response, which
ignored the abuse of children. Her Chair at the time also raised the issue with the
Police, according to this officer. The District Commander (2001-2005) could not recall
these conversations but was aware of the police action with secondary schools.
13.14 From an early stage, children's social care managers seemed reluctant to accept the
extent of the problem of CSE within the Borough. There were constant difficulties
over the allocation of referrals from Risky Business. In 2004, the Sexual Exploitation
Forum minutes indicated concerns raised by Risky Business that some referrals they
were making to children’s social care were being reclassified e.g.'Teenager out of
control'. A further minuted example was that of a project worker attempting to make
a referral and being told that she had to have witnessed the incident herself as third
party information would not be accepted. The long-standing tensions between the
Risky Business project and children’s social care are described in Chapter 9. As
already stated, the clear responsibility for resolving these tensions lay with those in
charge of children’s social care and youth services, who failed to do so over many
years.
13.15 From 2003 onwards, Directors of Safeguarding were regularly reporting problems
with recruitment and retention of social workers in a series of reports to their Lead
Member.
13.16 They described the negative impact this was having on services. These acute
staffing problems persisted in one form or another until 2010. A 2003 Social Services
Inspectorate report found that core services were under pressure and this was 'not
fully appreciated by the Council'. This was compounded by staff vacancies.
Children's social care received one star gradings in 2003 and 2004.
13.17 In 2004, a report was taken to the Cabinet Member for Social Services advising that
vacancy levels meant that it was not possible to allocate a number of cases, and that
the budget would be overspent. It was recommended that monthly rather than
quarterly reports be submitted in order to monitor concerns.
13.18 In December 2005, a joint paper from Police and Children and Young People's
Services was taken to the Safeguarding Board proposing significant changes to the
Rotherham service delivery response to CSE. It was recommended that Risky
Business become a multi agency resource by September 2006, and that the Sexual
Exploitation Forum become more strategic, limiting the discussion of individual cases. It was also agreed that the Forum would produce an Annual Report each
January.
13.19 The Police carried out an audit of 87 files in 2005, which resulted in them proposing
that large numbers of girls be removed from the Sexual Exploitation Forum
monitoring process. Risky Business challenged the factual accuracy and
completeness of some of the information in the audit, raising serious concerns about
many of the girls involved, where it was recommended they be removed from
monitoring. The Police reason for removing several girls from monitoring was they
were pregnant or had given birth. All looked after children were removed from the list.
Several of the cases removed from monitoring were read by the Inquiry and we found
Risky Business concerns to be valid. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the
Police, supported by children's social care, were intent on reducing the number of
names on Forum monitoring for CSE.
13.20 The minutes of the Sexual Exploitation Forum in 2005 and 2006 showed continuing
tensions between Risky Business and children's social care over the removal of girls
from Forum monitoring if they became child protection cases or were followed up by
children’s social care. There were also concerns recorded about Strategy meetings
not being convened when Risky Business requested them. A report to the
Safeguarding Board in June 2007 stated that there were no children on the Child
Protection Register due to issues of sexual exploitation and only two children looked
after by the local authority had been identified as at risk of sexual exploitation. Given
the large number of referrals for CSE known about within the statutory agencies at
that time, and the seriousness of the circumstances of individual children, confirmed
by the Inquiry's file reading, these figures suggest that the council was failing to use
its statutory powers to protect these children. There is no record in the minutes of any
challenge to these figures.
13.21 By 2008-09, more committed and focused leadership of CSE was apparent in the
CYPS. The appointment in 2007 of a part time lead for CSE contributed to this. The
person appointed was seen by all of those involved as a positive influence on the
difficulties between Risky Business and the children's social care staff, especially in
getting individual cases allocated. She was described by one interviewee as
providing 'a straight pathway to social work’.
13.22 She told the Inquiry that it was certainly conveyed by senior managers in the CYP
service that the extent of CSE was being exaggerated. A divide amongst senior
managers was also obvious. CSE was not seen as a priority at that time, especially
by some operational locality managers, who also thought Risky Business were
exaggerating, and had a high volume of competing priorities to meet. Her
unequivocal view was that the project accurately reflected the scale and seriousness
of the problem, even if their presentation was sometimes unorthodox.
13.23 From 2005 onwards, the post of Director of Safeguarding was the strategic and operational head of the children and families service, reporting to the Executive
Director of Children's Services, who should be assumed to have owned overarching
responsibility for the service response to CSE. However, in the structure of children's
services at that time, others at the same level had their own interests and
responsibilities that overlapped with safeguarding, such as the directors for
performance management and youth services. There were seven directors in total.
'A lot of in-fighting' amongst them was reported to the Inquiry. In the present
structure, there are two directors reporting to the Executive Director of Children's
Services.
13.24 The Children Act (2004) required all local authorities to establish integrated children’s
services by April 2008. The Director of Children’s Services (2005 – 2008) continued
the development programme initiated by her predecessor. This was a local
interpretation of the vision contained in the Government guidance ‘Every Child
Matters’. The focus was on the delivery of co-located services and management
within localities. Seven localities were created, each with two managers who
supervised children’s social care. It appeared that frontline staff whose jobs were
affected were not ready for the culture change that the reorganisation required. This
reorganisation was reported to consume a large amount of staff time and energy. It
was seen by some, both internally and in outside agencies, as diverting staff from
their core function of delivering quality services. It began in 2005 and was not
concluded by the time the Director of Children’s Services left in 2008. At that point,
integration of frontline services was still in progress. Some of the managers
appointed were not professionally qualified social workers and some who were
lacked child protection experience.
13.25 The Annual Performance Assessment letter for Children and Young People’s
Services in 2005 stated that staff turnover and sickness absence in social services
were too high. This was addressed by various recruitment initiatives. By 2007,
turnover of social workers had improved and vacancy levels had dropped to 14%, but
this was not sustained. In mid-2008, the vacancy rate was reported as over 40% at
its worst, and in 2009 was 37%.
13.26 The Ofsted Joint Area Review report in 2006 was very positive. However, it
contained the astonishing statement that ‘it appeared that vulnerable children and
young people are kept safe from abuse and exploitation’. This was not qualified in
any way. From the evidence described in Chapter 5 of this report, this was not an
accurate reflection of the situation, and may have served to give false reassurance to
those running the service.
13.27 Ofsted’s evaluation of children’s social care, which had been previously rated as
Good, started to decline. In the period April 2007 – March 2008, covered by the
2008 Annual Performance Assessment, it was judged overall as Adequate.
Specifically, Management of Children and Young People’s Services was judged
Adequate. Important weaknesses included that management oversight of looked after children had not ensured they had been fully safeguarded.
13.28 Set against a background of rising demand, high vacancies amongst social workers
and their managers, and reliance on agency staff to cover frontline posts, the
persistence with the reorganisation at that time might be seen as ill judged. Several
managers described the situation around 2007 onwards as ‘chaotic’. Other frontline
staff expressed the same view; the service appeared to have lacked the capacity to
implement a radical and highly complex reorganisation; and there was co-location but
no agreed line management arrangements. Waiting for the formal transfer of staff to
be agreed created organisational ‘inertia’, according to some. In the end the process
was not completed.
13.29 The current Executive Director of Children's Services had supported the integration
model of her predecessor but in 2009 determined it was not working and that 'the
basics' were not right. The Council and NHS Rotherham commissioned Children First
to carry out an external review of children's services. Reporting in May 2009, one of
the overall findings of the review was that 'Recent restructures have served to create
a complex and excessive number of teams and panels, which can lead to confusion
and increase risk. These require urgent rationalisation so that management lines
and performance accountabilities are absolutely clear and understood. The number
of panels relating to vulnerable children must be reviewed and rationalised to ensure
clarity, simplicity and manageable structures for all staff.'
13.30 The 2009 report also looked at Rotherham's resourcing of children's services, in
comparison to its benchmarking group. It found that the Council had very high levels
of expenditure on schools and nursery schools, but in contrast spending on most
children's social care services was relatively low, with spend on looked after children
especially low. The report questioned whether the resourcing of some high-risk
services was sufficient.
13.31 The first police operation in Rotherham to address multiple perpetrators of CSE was
Operation Central, in 2008. This was commended by many as an excellent example
of joint working between the Council and the Police.
13.32 Following the success of Operation Central, in 2009 the Police initiated Operation
Czar. On this occasion, children's social care would take a leading role and Risky
Business was told to close all its cases of young people who were to be included in
this Operation as children’s social care would allocate them to social workers. Apart
from the questionable practice of fracturing the relationships of these girls with Risky
Business staff, the evidence from file reading showed that some of those victims
were amongst the most serious cases of child sexual exploitation.
13.33 Operation Czar was not a success. It is not clear who precisely amongst the senior
officers took the decision to involve children's social care as the lead, without proper
preparation at the frontline, but it proved unwise in the event. The Executive Director
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of Children's Services (2008 to date) described how they 'tried to use the same
methodology and approach as Central, but it didn't work'. She was asked to secure
funding for two extra social workers for the operation, which she did.
13.34 Children's social care staff had no previous experience of this activity. The girls did
not trust them. They removed some of these girls from home and then returned them
within days, and many became closed cases very quickly after the Operation was
over, leaving them with no support. One young social worker involved described the
authority as 'a scary place to be in 2009'. She was 21, newly qualified and had never
had a practice placement in a local authority. About Operation Czar, she said
‘nobody knew what they were supposed to be doing. Just firefighting. We attended
loads of meetings. We were always ten paces behind the perpetrators. Everyone
involved wanted to do a good job on Czar but it was all badly managed.' Some
Abduction Notices were served, but there were no arrests.
13.35 By late 2009, when the Minister of State served an Improvement Notice on the
Council for its children's safeguarding services, there is no doubt that the systems
and operations for protecting Rotherham's children were unsafe. The Director of
Safeguarding (2010-11) described what she found on taking up post. There were
significant vacancies; a lot of agency staff were being used; there was a lack of
management oversight; poor accountability for casework; poor monitoring of
unallocated work; poor monitoring of assessment times; looked after children lacked
plans in some instances; quality of practice was generally weak and the complexity of
cases was very high; the quality of professional supervision was poor, sometimes
provided by managers who were not social work qualified. Staff were overwhelmed,
and disempowered, and felt senior staff were 'invisible'. Despite this context, she saw
no complacency about CSE. The Inquiry concluded that the quality and extent of
children's social care support to the young people who were victims or at risk must
surely have suffered.
13.36 There ensued a great deal of work to reform systems and put in place quality
assurance and performance management processes. The structure of the service
was revised; professional supervision of social workers was provided only by social
work managers who were experienced in child protection. Social workers who were
in post in 2009 described the experience now to be ‘unrecognisable’ because of
these improvements.
13.37 Following the publication of the Home Affairs Select Committee report in June 2013,
a report to the Cabinet by the Executive Director of Children's Services stated that
'Tackling the sexual exploitation of children and young people remains the highest
priority for Rotherham Borough Council'. It also recommended that a quarterly report
on progress against the local child sexual exploitation Action Plan be brought to Cabinet