THE COUNCIL is set to spend more than £1m on social workers for children’s services in the coming year.

This comes after it was revealed a shortage of carers had left some social workers with up to 50 children to look after.

Speaking at a press briefing last week, councillor Anthony Pollock, executive member for finance at Wokingham Borough Council (WBC), said: “We’ve had increasing numbers of cases and the caseloads are going up.

“We have been employing a larger number of agency (social workers) who are more expensive so in order to get the caseloads down to a realistic level and to pull back the costs, we’ve had to invest in some more social workers.

“Some (social workers) were carrying 50 cases. I think, on the one hand, we need to make the investment but we also have to dig down to make sure that the cases that are open should be open.”

The social worker spend, which is expected to cost £1.13m, comes after a staggering 246 per cent increase in the demand for its child protection services from March 2017 to September 2018.

These figures were revealed just after Ofsted slammed the council’s children’s services for a “deterioration” in the department’s provisions for children.

In January, director of children’s services at WBC, Carol Cammiss, told councillors social workers had not kept records of children up-to-date because of the increase in demand for child protection plans.

Speaking last month, she said: “We have struggled to meet the demand given we have not had an increase in the number of social workers to meet the demand.

“What goes first is that recording, because the social workers want to see the children.

“This doesn’t mean we accept this as being good enough. But we do have to accept that there has been a massive increase in demand.

“We will see progress. We have lots of different ways to assess this rather than just reports. We are being very direct.”

Despite this, council documents show the authority expects a £50,000 saving in administration costs in children’s services, although it is not yet clear what this spending reduction includes.

Graham Ebers, chief finance officer at WBC, said it was “unsafe for a social worker to carry too many cases” at a council press briefing detailing the authority’s budget for the upcoming year on Thursday, February 14.

The increased spend on social workers means the council anticipates it will be able to spend almost £750,000 less on sending children to be looked after in other local authorities.

Mr Ebers said: “It’s a combination of recognising the current spending on placements and the fact that more work will go on during the year to get more cost-effective placement solutions.”