'Loyalty payments of £2,000' and recruitment from South Africa: Greater Manchester's social care crisis and the millions spent fixing it
manchestereveningnews.co.ukGreater Manchester's councils have spent more than £123m on social care staff from agencies since 2020. Social care is a vital sector - providing services to families, young people, the elderly and people living with disabilities - and problems in the system have a knock-on effect for the NHS.
But councils are battling to fill hundreds of vacancies for adult and children social worker roles, and to recruit and retain carers. READ MORE Flash EncroChat dealer suddenly went quiet on cops after they made a big discovery READ MORE 'He was only taken away from the house 45 minutes earlier and now I was being told he was dead' A Freedom of Information request (FOI) submitted by the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) found out exactly how much each council in Greater Manchester has spent in three years to maintain their staffing levels in the social care sector - totalling £123,242,762.
In their responses, detailed below, each council has described the steps they are taking to build a permanent workforce. It's difficult to quantify exactly how much more it costs to recruit social workers and carers from agencies than it would to employ people in-house.
But Greater Manchester's town halls say they are keen to reduce their dependence on agency staff, with Oldham's children services lead describing their use as 'expensive', and describing how a single agency social worker can cost '£20,000 in fees alone'.
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