Council bosses last week responded to questions on the safeguarding complaint, which the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman revealed in October.
During an investigation, the council was found to have more than 1,100 unread emails in its social work inbox, including 500 police reports, which had accumulated between 2019 and 2023.
Cllr Lucia Das Neves, the council’s cabinet member for health, social care and wellbeing, apologised at a cabinet meeting on Tuesday (November 11) and set out the council’s action plan.
She said: “We now have a whole new management team in place, we’ve made substantial improvements to how we work, there are clearer lines of accountability, stronger oversight and internal structures have been strengthened, especially around that receipt of incoming queries and emails.
“Clear timelines are in place so our aim is all safeguarding referrals are triaged within 48 hours of arriving with us. We’ve also commissioned an external review to give us some independent assurance we’re being effective and doing the right things and strengthening what we do at the moment and think about what others are doing elsewhere so we can learn.
“We also have ongoing audits, data collecting and staff training to continue to evidence the change, the learning and improvements to staff responsiveness.”
Liberal Democrat opposition leader Cllr Luke Cawley-Harrison asked how residents can be assured the triaging approach “leads to action”, adding: “It’s one thing to triage, it’s another thing to act on it.”
According to the council, senior management was made aware of the backlog in early 2024.
Calling this one of the most serious cases he’d witnessed, Cllr Cawley-Harrison also asked why the council kept it “a secret”, adding it didn’t lead to a “transparent council”.
Cllr Das Neves agreed the incident was “totally unacceptable” and “not what a good service looks like”.
However, she said she disagreed the council was “keeping it a secret”, saying it was “not hiding from it”.
“I think what we’ve worked really hard to do is address the issue and change processes,” she said.
Sara Sutton, corporate director for adults, housing, and health, said: “We aim to triage within 48 hours or two working days and each case will be different. We’ll triage based on the level of risk.”
Ms Sutton added that a lot of cases would take “much longer than a short period of time to resolve” so “protective measures” would be put in place while the team investigated issues.
She said the police reports would be rated red, amber, or green “on the basis of risk”. She added that currently the council had no outstanding police reports.
Cllr Cawley-Harrison asked again why the backlog was “kept behind closed doors” when it was known about for “over a year”.
Cllr Das Neves said she believed the council had been “clear” and that it had been focusing on “a new way of working” in the time it had to address the problem.
