Rotherham Council leader: 'The town has come a long way since abuse scandal'

Serious child abuse failures at Rotherham Council ‘more cock up than conspiracy’

The report, which had been commissioned by Rotherham Council, revealed in graphic detail how at least 1,400 children, mostly white girls, had been victims of CSE over a thirteen-year period. The perpetrators were mostly men from what Professor Jay described as the “Pakistani heritage community”, a formulation more common in academia than on the streets of Rotherham.

Understandably the report made headlines around the world. The council, and in many ways the town and its community, are still healing. Twenty criminals have been sentenced to nearly 300 years in prison for what are termed “non-recent” offences. The National Crime Agency have arrested a further 24 men, bringing the first charges against seven of them.

If you look back today to those headlines from 2014, when the word “Rotherham” took on a new meaning, it felt to us like the world changed. Children’s voices would be heard. We wanted the best to come out of the misery, not just for our remarkable Rotherham CSE survivors, but so that other places too could avoid the kind of disaster that we endured. This week, the council published six reports that shed further light on what went wrong.

Three years on it seems to me that those hopes are reaching crunch time. Timely new research from the Local Government Association shows that three quarters of councils overspent their children’s services budgets last year.

The budgets that councils had planned were £600m short of what they needed to spend. Coun Richard Watts, the chair of the LGA’s Children and Young People Board, says that services are “being pushed to breaking point”.

At the same time, nearly 60 per cent of all children’s services still fall below Ofsted’s “outstanding” or “good” ratings. One in six children’s social workers is employed on an agency contract in a profession where stability can be crucial.

The challenge isn’t going to resolve itself. Child protection enquiries nationally have risen by 140 per cent in the last 10 years. In Rotherham, the number of children who are looked after by the local authority has risen 20 per cent in the last year alone.

Behind each of those statistics is a story. It may be neglect. Or abuse. Or substance addiction. The consequences of misogyny or violence. Often enough a story of events that happened to fall cruelly on the shoulders of a young person, who then needed the rest of us to rally round and try to keep their life on track.

In Rotherham’s case, about two thirds of our budget is spent on vulnerable children and adults. Far from the potholes and bin emptying that people associate with their local council, most of our expenditure is dedicated to a small proportion of our residents.

But local authority budgets have been cut by nearly a quarter – with deeper cuts in poorer areas. Something is going to give.

“Rotherham” certainly wasn’t just about funding. But you can’t run public services on thin air, and you won’t prevent CSE if you don’t have the right staff taking time, piecing together information, building trust with a child. You won’t prosecute an offender successfully unless you put really strong support around a victim. It just costs money. Yet even now the Home Office cannot make a decision around extra funding to support survivors through Rotherham’s forthcoming trials into “non-recent” abuse.

Rotherham is a long way from where we were. Our investments are bringing results; more social workers, in better conditions, delivering improved services. A revamped approach to tackling CSE is raising awareness in every school, dedicated staff are working across agencies, keeping children safe and putting abusers behind bars.

We’ve plenty more to do of course – but complacency is forever banned.

Even if there is an easing of austerity, we need to have a clear sense of our priorities for the resources that remain.

My worry, when conversations about vulnerable children and the threats that they face remain so difficult, is that we avoid them. And we’ve seen how that story ends before.

By Chris Read, leader of Rotherham Council.

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