Increasing number of children experiencing exploitation in Cardiff, says city council

Ted Peskett, local democracy reporter

There are increasing numbers of children with complex needs and an increasing number who are experiencing exploitation in Cardiff, according to the local council.

Cardiff Council’s director of children’s services, Deborah Driffield, told members of the council’s children and young people scrutiny committee at a meeting on Tuesday, October 7, about some of the major challenges faced by the social care team.

In October 2024 councillors were told the local authority was overspending on its budget by millions of pounds due to pressures on children’s services and education.

A council report on the performance of social services in 2024-25 already predicts there will be an overspend of £3m in the budget for children’s services for month four of 2025-26.

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Residential placements

Ms Driffield said: “The biggest pressure on children’s services is the cost of residential placements but actually what we’ve seen over the last… five or six months for the first time in a while [is] not only the increasing cost but the increase in actual numbers.

“We’ve now got a work stream that we’ve pulled into place very quickly to start trying to understand what’s caused that.”

She later said another big issue the service faces is “the really increasing demand and complexity around children with additional needs”.

She added: “That’s our other biggest area of overspend.

“It absolutely isn’t something that we’re not aware of.

“Whether we’ll be able to manage within that budget we’re still reporting on that and doing everything we can to reduce the overspend.”

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Contacts

Cardiff Council’s social services annual report shows the number of contacts to children’s services went down by 6% from 34,545 in 2023-24 to 32,339 in 2024-25.

However it states the number of contacts and referrals, and the complexity of the presenting issues children have, remains high.

Another report on the children’s services’ delivery plan for 2025-26 shows some of the main issues faced by the council directorate include managing increasing demand, sufficiency of suitable placements for children, and “increasing numbers of children experiencing exploitation which is exposing them to violent behaviour and is drawing a small minority of children into violent criminal behaviour”.

The report referencs the recruitment and retention of experienced social workers as a challenge.

Ms Driffield said staffing within the children’s service at Cardiff Council has “seen more churn than we would have liked”.

She added: “We are aware that we’re not [as] competitive as we’d like to be with some other authorities that pay more.

“We’ve just completed our report to make sure that we have the market supplement in place and that it’s extended because without that we would lose so many staff because pay is important.

“We are looking at other initiatives at the moment… to try and attract more experienced workers.

“We’ve done a huge amount of work… in terms of growing your own and supporting those newly-qualified workers.

“We have a stable senior management team and a frontline management team, which we’ve never had before.”

There were positives to take from the assessment of children’s services in Cardiff.

Reduction

One report states a reduction in the number of children looked after over the years is “evident” and work has started on a new initiative aimed at increasing foster placement capacity in the city.

A family advice and support service called early help has also been integrated into children’s services at Cardiff Council with the hope of reducing the need for intervention.

Council data shows the number of children added to the child protection register in Cardiff went down from 639 in 2023-24 to 634 in 2024-25.

The number of children who started to be looked after in 2024-25 went down from 256 in the previous year to 239.