here<\/a><\/strong>.<\/strong><\/p>\nThe council will spend just \u00a3148,800 per year on advocacy and independent visitor services. According to one council boss, most of the advocates in Bristol are either already in the legal profession or studying law. Advocating for children in care is then work they take on additionally. Nonetheless, the service was described by councillors as a \u201creal lifeline\u201d for children in care.<\/p>\n
Gail Rogers, head of service for children and commissioning, said: \u201cWe know this is a really valued service. It makes a huge difference for some children who are particularly having a difficult time, and are able to talk to somebody else who isn\u2019t part of their care arrangements about how they\u2019re feeling.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s specialist quasi-legal training for advocates. They\u2019re receiving a rate that\u2019s nationally approved and that would go up with inflation. I absolutely hear that about needing to pay people a decent wage to do what they\u2019re doing. All I can say is that this is paid at a national average, and that we\u2019re not struggling to find advocates.\u201d<\/p>\n
The committee voted five to two in favour of recommissioning the contract for a further five years, with the two Labour councillors voted against. In the same meeting, councillors approved plans to hire a \u201ctransformation director\u201d on a salary of \u00a3130,000 and spent \u00a36 million this year on a \u201ctransformation delivery partner\u201d, in a bid to cut the costs of children in care.<\/p>\n
One of the largest challenges facing the council\u2019s budget is the ballooning cost of caring for children. Councils are legally obliged to pay for care for some children, and the fees charged by care companies have risen sharply in recent years, as well as the number of children needing care. This problem is affecting many councils across the country, not just in Bristol.<\/p>\n
Council bosses are now trying to prevent children needing to go into care, by providing targeted support at an earlier stage. This would stop family breakdowns, with better outcomes for both the children and the council\u2019s budget. But knowing where to provide that early support is tricky, so a lot of taxpayer\u2019s money will be spent on \u201cdigging into the data\u201d, to help cut the cost of care.<\/p>\n
Green Cllr Shona Jemphrey said: \u201cThis transformation director post, that\u2019s going to be \u00a3130,000 on one person\u2019s salary. That feels like a lot of money.\u201d<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the \u201ctransformation delivery partner\u201d will be paid \u00a36 million this year and \u00a31.5 million next year. This will be an external consultancy company, which has worked in other cities to help councils reduce the cost of care. It\u2019s hoped council staff will be able to learn from their expertise.<\/p>\n
Fiona Tudge, director of children and families, said: \u201cSo in terms of preventing children from coming into care, we had a team whose role that was to do, and they had good outcomes. And yet our data was still showing us that we had high numbers of adolescents coming into care.<\/p>\n
\u201cA strategic partner comes in and really digs into that for us \u2014 how can we make sure that we\u2019re working with the right children at risk of coming into care, rather than children we think are at risk of coming into care but that we haven\u2019t actually got quite right so far. They will be able to support and dig into that, so that we\u2019re targeting the right children.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Meanwhile a new “transformation director” will be hired on \u00a3130,000 a yearLabour Councillor Kerry Bailes called for higher…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":88875,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8818],"tags":[381,3893,748,3374,393,4884,528,285,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-88874","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-bristol","8":"tag-bristol","9":"tag-bristol-city-council","10":"tag-britain","11":"tag-employment","12":"tag-england","13":"tag-great-britain","14":"tag-labour-party","15":"tag-politics","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114481052290515010","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88874"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88874\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/88875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Labour](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/0_kerry-bailes.png\")
Labour Councillor Kerry Bailes called for higher pay(Image: Bristol City Council Live \/ YouTube)<\/p>\n