WHEN Glasgow City Council alerted me to plans to close its multi-dimensional treatment foster care service, officials were anxious that I didn’t link the decision with last summer’s industrial tribunal verdict.
At that tribunal, foster carers James and Christine Johnstone won a ruling that the nature of the service they provided to the council made them employees, rather than independent contractors.
The implications were potentially costly for the city. Only ten foster households are affected, and the decision is being appealed. But since July, the council have been paying the Johnstones, and nine other treatment foster care (TFC) households, the equivalent of around £30,000 a year. This despite the fact only one child is currently receiving the intensive service for some of the city’s most at-risk kids.
But the tribunal decision is not the reason the service is being closed, the council says. Instead a paper submitted to the meeting of Glasgow’s Integration Joint Board this week explains the service was already under review and has been found wanting. TFC is too costly given the collectively disappointing results achieved for the children concerned, chief social work officer Suzanne Millar says.
This may be true, but I don’t need to link the decision with that made at the Johnstones’ tribunal. Ms Millar herself says: “If [the council’s appeal] is unsuccessful, there are risks that the claimants will be successful with their claims for unlawful deductions from wages and whistleblowing. There will be risks that similar claims will be made by other carers in TFC...”
A costly service, which delivers no significant benefit to children compared with a regular foster placement, was therefore set to get more costly still.
I am tempted to link the council’s decision to its plan to end sleepover shifts, however. The planned service redesign by the city’s Health and Social Care Partnership is part of a “wholesale move to alternative care support arrangements”, the HSCP noted.
Is this, too, nothing to do with a employment tribunal decision which found staff working sleepovers should be paid the minimum wage, and the recent Scottish Government decision that they should no longer be exempt from the care workers’ living wage?
I can’t be alone in seeing a pattern here of Glasgow being asked to recognised the rights of employees and deciding that perhaps it doesn’t need the service they provide after all. I am reluctant to single out one council as – particularly in relation to sleepovers – there is every chance that other Scottish councils will watch Glasgow’s progress and follow suit. With foster care, it is slightly different as the judge at the Johnstone’s tribunals made it clear the intense nature of the TFC service made their role exceptional.
However I note Hampshire Council is currently facing a claim from a more traditional foster carer for employee recognition.
It seems likely such cases will increasingly challenge those purchasing care over cost and corner cutting. Ultimately they add to the pressing need for a wider debate about the care we expect, what we pay for it, and whether it is remotely enough.
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