Agenda item

Delivered by Brian Boxall. Report attached

The Independent Chair of both Safeguarding Boards presented the Boards’ annual reports. The Children’s Board had been statutory since 2006 and the Adults Board would become statutory under the Care Act. Both Boards sought to look at the safeguarding practices of individual agencies and discuss or challenge these.

The Children’s Board had changed what safeguarding in Havering looked like. A lot of work had been undertaken on child sexual exploitation and identifying children subject to abuse. It was accepted that gangs were starting to be an issue in Havering although this was very much in its early stage. There were also issues with female genital mutilation in Havering although not in large numbers. The Chair felt that any new Joint Strategic Needs Assessment should reflect these issues.

Levels of mental health support had been an issue under child sexual exploitation as well as in cases of children self-harming, including in junior schools. Schools were currently undertaking work for the Children’s Safeguarding Board on this area.

The Board Chair felt that all commissioners should consider safeguarding of children and adults and that it was essential to ensure commissioned services were safe into the future. Most safeguarding problems had resulted not from a lack of staff ability but were due to staff not coping with workloads. It was therefore essential to establish long-term staffing plans. The Board agreed that staffing levels were issues in areas such as health visiting and school nursing and that this could impact on safeguarding.

It was important that individual agencies understood the impact of the Adults Safeguarding Board having statutory status.

The Board agreed that child sexual exploitation was an important issue nationally and it was important that victims were supported and that early intervention took place. The Safeguarding Board worked closely with the Children’s Society. The Board had challenged the Police on the level of their investigation teams but this was more an operational issue for community safety. The numbers of convicted paedophiles resident in Havering were not known. The Police special child investigation team was shared with Barking & Dagenham. The Police had agreed that this team was under-resourced but there had been no changes as yet. This would be followed up before the end of the calendar year.

A transitional group was looking at the transition from children’s to adult services. This included mental health services for teenagers which was a national issue. Schools had good input into both Safeguarding Boards.   

A peer review of work on serious youth violence was currently in progress. This was being undertaken by the Home Office and £96,000 of community safety funding had been reallocated to deal with this issue in schools. Mentoring schemes were used for troubled teenagers and anti-social behaviour orders were also used to prevent at risk adolescents from entering the town centre.

The Safeguarding Boards worked closely with community safety agencies. This allowed the agencies to explain what they felt were current risks and long-term challenges.

It was noted that the Adult Board, once it received statutory status, would need a sufficient level of funding. This would require lobbying of central government as most other London boroughs did not receive additional funding for troubled teenagers. This was particularly topical as recent press coverage had suggested gangs were moving from inner London to more outlying areas. Havering was in the early stages of transformation in this area and could learn from work carried out in other areas.

The Board thanked the Independent Chair for his presentation and work. The annual reports for next year were due to be presented to the Health and Wellbeing Board in November 2015.