Bucks Council struggling to find social workers as staff leave due to cost-of-living crisis

Buckinghamshire Council is struggling to find social workers, a report has warned, after staff left due to the cost-of-living crisis.

Some 33 social workers left the council’s children’s services between April 2023 to March 2024, according to a new annual report.

The 47-page document read: “A number of these were due to needing to relocate due to the cost-of-living crisis, and challenges to replace social workers has continued.”

The report, which was presented to the council’s children’s and education select committee on Thursday, also confirmed that the position of ‘principal social worker’ at the council has remained vacant since November 2023.

The details come after a recent freedom of information request revealed that some council social worker vacancies have been vacant for years, that the unitary authority currently has 41 vacancies and that it even has one social worker who is based abroad.

During Thursday’s committee meeting, council officers were grilled by concerned councillors over the stark shortfall of social workers, a situation which is part of a national trend and not exclusive to Buckinghamshire.

Cllr Diana Blamires told the committee: “I notice that the principal social worker role has been vacant for a really long time.”

The councillor asked for details on how many candidates the council had interviewed for the post and asked, ‘what was going wrong?’

One of the council’s children’s directors Aman Sekhon-Gill confirmed that seven people were interviewed for the post towards the end of July but that the council was not able to appoint anyone due to the ‘quality of the candidates’ and that it had also tried to hire someone internally.

The director also said the council was ‘really focusing in’ on the general recruitment of social workers within Buckinghamshire, which she claimed could help alleviate the impacts of the cost-of-living on the staff.

Several councillors, including Paul Turner, asked questions about social workers struggling to pay their rent and bills,

He told the meeting: “It is not difficult to see that the cost of living will be one of the difficulties for recruitment and retention.”

The councillor added that housing costs specifically were likely to be one of several reasons why social workers could not afford to live in Buckinghamshire and ‘in some cases were forced to move elsewhere’.

Richard Nash, the council’s children’s social care director replied: “The colleagues who left the service mostly recently left because of significant unexpected changes in their housing costs.”

He added: “That isn’t – touch wood – something that is continuing. There was a phase of that happening.”

Councillor Isobel Darby also asked if the council had the ‘right criteria’ to fill the role of ‘principal social worker’.

But Nash defended the council’s recruitment strategy, saying: “We make sure that the job description and person specification are right and make sure it is really clear what we are asking for.”

He added: “I don’t think we have missed anything, and we go back and look at applicants. It is really about doing this again at the right time from now. I don’t want to be rushed.”

The council officers at the meeting claimed that audits of the council’s social service showed that it continued to perform well and improve and that all the statutory parts of the principal social worker post were being covered and would continue to be so.

Sekhon-Gill also stressed that new social workers received plenty of opportunities to shadow more experienced colleagues during their induction and claimed they were ‘nurtured’ and had access to drop-in sessions for support.

She was responding to a question asked by Cllr Lesley Clarke about how the council stopped new social workers becoming ‘overwhelmed’ by their casework.