Issue - meetings

REPORT OF THE COMMUNITY HEALTH AND WELLBEING TEAM LEADER

A review of safeguarding children and adults at risk activity across NHDC from April 2018 - March 2019.

RESOLVED:  That the Overview and Scrutiny Committee:

(1)       Received and commented on the annual report of progress made against the Council’s fulfilment of the statutory duty to maintain an effective safeguarding function with regard to children;

(2)       Received and commented on the annual report of progress made against the Council’s fulfilment of the statutory duty to maintain an effective safeguarding function with regard to adults at risk;

(3)       Agreed that sufficient and robust processes are in place at NHDC for application and review of safeguarding processes and that an annual review and presentation to the Overview and Scrutiny Committee should continue, be agreed; and

(4)       Expressed their disappointment with the apparent disproportionately small number of elected Members who had undertaken safeguarding training and requested that Members were investigated into who had received safeguarding training from other sources. All Members are made aware, once again, of the ability to complete e-learning training and that all relevant group leaders, port folio holders and shadow port-folio holders raise the issue of training requirement at their group meetings.

REASON FOR DECISION:

The resolution is the best course of action that can be accommodated within the approved budget and officer resources, that will fulfil our statutory and lawful obligations but also ensure that a regular, corporate review exists.

The meeting adjourned for a short comfort break at 8.35pm.

Audio Recording – Start of Item – 44 Minutes 12 Seconds

The Community Health and Wellbeing Team Leader introduced the Annual Review of Safeguarding Children and Adults at Risk.  Before she drew Members attention to aspects of the Safeguarding activity 2018/19, the Community Health and Wellbeing Team Leader explained, for the benefit of new Members of The Overview and Scrutiny Committee, some background to everything they did with respect to safeguarding children and adults at risk, what they did and why they did it in order to give assurance to Members that the service that was provided was excellent.  She explained the following:

·                There was a legal duty to safeguard both children and adults at risk.

·                The duty to safeguard children was set down in the Children Act 2004.

·                The duty to safeguard adults was brought in much more recently, in The Care Act 2014.

·                Adults referred to were those with care and support needs.

·                The statutory function as a district council was purely to refer and information share concerns to the relevant agency for necessary action.

·                Due to being in a two tier authority system the duty to investigate was held with Hertfordshire County Council, however NHDC had a duty under law to refer any concerns.

The Community Health and Wellbeing Team Leader explained and provided Members with statistical information in respect of the different concern types and communicated the volume of referrals provided within the report.

The Community Health and Wellbeing Team Leader informed Members that when dealing with the safeguarding of children, no referral consent was required.  The law stipulated that, where there were concerns about the welfare of a child, a referral was required irrespective of whether or not family members were in agreement.

With respect to the safeguarding of adults, referral consent was required, unless the adult was deemed to lack mental capacity to make the decision or where, indeed, the abuse would likely affect other people and would be in the wider interest of the safety of others.

The Community Health and Wellbeing Team Leader further explained that Domestic Abuse referrals were also required which she informed were ranked on a scoring system and provided statistics from both the Hertfordshire Independent Domestic Violence Advisor, (IDVA) and the Hertfordshire Multi Agency Risk Assessment Conference (MARAC) system.

The Community Health and Wellbeing Team Leader explained the context of “threshold” to the Members and reported that a number of cases whereby concerns had been logged, but had not been referred due to the threshold not being met.   She informed that because all concerns were now logged in a central database, her team were able to cross reference new concerns and make a referral if and when the threshold was reached.

Referrals had steadily risen over the last 5 years, however, the Community Health and Wellbeing Team Leader felt that this was mainly due to the centralisation of records for the first time, corporate awareness, awareness raising campaigns that had resulted in an increased confidence among officers of  ...  view the full minutes text for item 41