Blackpool Council: local authority assessment

The Chief Executive and councillors oversaw the local authority’s leadership and management structure. The Director of Adult Social Services (DASS), and Director of Public Health reported into the Chief Executive. Some roles that supported Care Act responsibilities such as business intelligence, people’s finances, feedback and complaints reported into a resource directorate as corporate services. Social care commissioning had an ‘all-age’ approach and reported directly to the Chief Executive. The Principal Social Worker (PSW) reported into the Assistant Director of Adult Social Care who reported into the DASS. Key senior leaders lived in Blackpool and had worked for the local authority for a number of years within various posts. There was a sense of pride in serving the local people in the area.

There was a lack of robust governance. For example, there were shortfalls in coproduction, implementation of aspirations and monitoring of guidance, policy or strategy to ensure standards and actions were effective and making a difference to people’s outcomes in Blackpool. Where there was staff guidance, policy or strategy submitted to the CQC, most was in a draft format, very newly created or in some examples out of date. This demonstrated staff had not had clear processes to understand and carry out Care Act responsibilities and expected standards. Where guidance, policy or strategy had been created it was too early to evidence any impact it was having.

There were adult social care senior management team meetings and senior leaders told us feedback from staff meetings and periodic checks and audits fed into these. All frontline staff had assigned managers, and these managers attended joined up management meetings to support working together. The DASS told us there had been some changes to improve leadership capacity and address gaps in resources to carry out key actions needed over the past two years. There had been investment in an Assistant Director of Adult Social Care role, a PSW role had been created (previously split between two operational heads of service), and 4 practice development leads. They had experienced high turnover in management positions and longstanding gaps but they were now filled. We heard the additional leadership and management capacity had directly led to a reduction in much higher wait lists experienced post-pandemic (COVID 19).

A crisis intervention approach was found at all levels within the local authority. Staff and partners consistently told us senior leaders were approachable and responsive to individual safety concerns. However, they also told us there was ambiguity and a lack of staff engagement. The leadership approach had resulted in lack of clear strategic direction and delayed pace around necessary actions needed to ensure effective governance, management and accountability arrangements. For example, the local authority had been rolling out a new adult social care assessment model for over 2 years. Senior leaders consistently told us this had taken longer than expected to implement and there was mixed feedback as to why it had not yet been successful. We found there was a lack of quality assurance embedded around the roll out including staff supervision assurances, a broad range of thematic audits, effective staff guidance, robust data analysis and commissioned resources to deliver the vision. Senior leaders consistently told us the delayed implementation was mostly due to workforce confidence and performance issues. This was a key priority for the PSW role to address by further building on staff confidence and demonstrating the positive impact the changes to assessment and intervention would have on people’s experiences. The DASS and PSW had held staff briefings to listen to staff challenges and promote the change needed to assessment and intervention. The PSW had open lines of communication with the Safeguarding Adults Board (SAB) chair and DASS and was aligned in the senior leadership structure as independent from operational management. This showed the local authority’s commitment to the value and credibility of having a PSW to lead, develop and standardise practice through engagement with front line staff. The DASS felt the PSW role had already begun to make a difference particularly reviewing and refreshing the offer of learning circles to build on foundations with staff. However, it was too early to evidence any impact the role could have on influencing and shaping future practice and strategy. There were examples of how the PSW linked with senior leaders around risk and practice considerations. However, there was more to do, as not all staff were clear about how the local authority was working towards reducing risks to keeping people safe where there were shortfalls in carrying out Care Act duties.

Staff communication was not robust within the local authority. Staff told us team meetings were not always regularly held or attended; however, staff did always engage and value daily duty huddles to discuss assessment practice and individual risk to people with care and support needs. Attendance for supervision was also sporadic. Depending on roles some staff received 6 monthly 1:1s, others had targets for 6 weekly but staff told us these did not always happen. A senior leader told us the department struggled to deliver on supervision targets as when teams were busy supervision would be compromised. To tackle this there was a supervision tracker for managers to complete and monitor compliance. For newly qualified social workers senior leaders were assured supervision was more frequent. There were plans to develop an electronic supervision monitoring system and roll out across teams to support performance monitoring. However, this still needed to be implemented.

The DASS visited team to team once a year to talk to staff in detail and emails went out to share in daily duty huddles. However, there was mixed findings as to how effectively key leadership messages were shared with staff. There were plans to develop a newsletter and an adult services library for staff to improve communication, however this had not yet been implemented.

There had been changes to ensure adult social care had its own focus in cabinet and to support councillors to be informed about risks facing adult social care. Challenge and scrutiny formally took place where senior leaders could be held to account through questions and papers. However, the effectiveness of scrutiny and local government representatives was inconsistent. A senior leader had sourced a Local Government Association (LGA) mentor which had empowered them to further understand adult social care challenges and drive forward best practice to make positive changes in Blackpool. The local authority held a risk register which was regularly monitored by senior leaders. Not all risks found during the CQC assessment were identified within the risk register or improvement plans. However, there was enthusiasm by some senior leaders to improve and learn from open and transparent practice. For example, progress had been made around carrying out post incident reviews, this was having a positive impact around understanding the effectiveness of risk management and escalation arrangements. However, there was a need to further embed this approach across all areas to further understand local risks before they occurred and evidence effectiveness.

The local authority’s vision was not clearly defined or consistently practiced. There was a heavy focus on improved finances and funding being the solution to the challenges we found. This may have distracted focus and vision on what could be done. There were ideas within draft prevention, commissioning and new workforce strategy and changes started around the assessment approach. However, we found a peer review had brought up similar concerns 2 years ago, and although the peer review had led to an action plan, on the CQC’s review of the recommendations little progress had been evidenced.

The corporate leadership board met weekly, and this was where development of strategy, vision and actions were overseen. However, at the time of the CQC assessment staff and senior leaders did not have clear direction informed by adult social care strategy and vision. For example, the vision for adult social care 'Live Well' was developed within the corporate leadership board and aimed to support staff in identifying their role within the vision. There were practical examples of how staff carried out the vision, such as conversations with managers in daily duty huddles. Whilst the vision linked with generic themes across health partnerships it was not directly underpinned by adult social care strategy, frameworks, target operating models or strategic planning to influence change and monitor any action needed to be taken.

Senior leaders and partners consistently told us dealing with crisis and financial pressures significantly hindered the local authority’s pace to deliver actions needed to improve care and support outcomes for people and local communities. Senior leaders and partners consistently told us there was a greater need for partners to come together but there was a lack of sustainable action to effectively enable this. There were partnership forums and boards where senior leaders from key partners came together. Senior leaders told us there was multi agency work underway to prevent or address health and care issues earlier in a person’s journey in the most deprived areas of the town, and to avoid conveyance to hospital where health and care needs deteriorate, requiring intervention, bringing together community health and care services in a more responsive closer to home approach. However, there were significant system challenges and difficulties to find adequate resource to ensure effective delivery in joint plans particularly to move to a preventative approach to prevent, reduce or delay people developing care and support needs at the time of the CQC assessment.

There was a lack of evidence based use of information about risks, performance, inequalities and outcomes. A senior leader told us corporately the local authority was flexible to change what was needed and if something didn’t work, they would change it. Strategic planning from data was a challenge for the local authority. We found and senior leaders, partners and staff consistently told us there were data quality issues and gaps. This impacted the accuracy of information, evidence to plan effective resource and monitor any effectiveness or learning of delivery of Care Act duties that could be drawn from this. The local authority had plans to address this for example through progressing recruitment to dedicated data support for adult social care department.

The local authority had arrangements to maintain the security, availability, integrity and confidentiality of data, records and data management systems. Staff had access to mandatory training

Blackpool Council reported quarterly about personal data breaches and corporately provided an overview of compliance within areas of data protection legislation. This was intended to provide visibility of breaches to members of the committee and provide opportunity to discuss trends and actions to mitigate the likelihood of reoccurrences. The local authority had a record and understanding of failures of data security. Data showed a slight reduction in personal data breaches and that none-posed a significant risk to the rights and freedoms of the data subjects or the Council in terms of financial or reputational risk.

There were local authority staff who used systems outside of the monitoring of corporate governance processes. For example, staff in teams that accessed multiple digital recording systems including health systems told us there was some inconsistencies around access which at times resulted in staff needing to find ‘work arounds’ to access information needed. The CQC reported this to senior leaders who addressed this with health leaders responsible for these agreements.

When there was an information breach, action was taken to understand why it had happened and how it could be prevented in the future. An example was given that a questionnaire had been sent to the address of a deceased person. Information governance completed an investigation into this, understood what information had been made available and the actioned risk reduction measures. In this case, a slight change was made to the process of linking into a commissioned service to ensure they would feed back to the local authority when changes occurred.