Child relinquishment requests

1.The total number of child relinquishment requests per year for each of the last ten years.

For the avoidance of doubt, this refers to instances where birth or adoptive parents contacted the local authority requesting that Children's Social Care Services assume care responsibility for a child.
2. For the calendar years 2023 and 2024, and for 2025 if available:

The number of referrals received by Children's Social Care Services where domestic abuse was recorded as a factor; and If 2025 figures are incomplete, please provide whatever data is currently available and specify the date range that the data covers.
3. For each of the last five years, please provide either:

a) The annual staff (or ideally just social worker, if these figure exist) sickness or absence rate already held by the authority (for example, percentage of working time lost),

b) If no such percentage is routinely recorded, the total number of working days lost to sickness/absence and the total number of contracted working days for Children's Social Care Services staff in each year.

Please provide whichever of the above is held in recorded form.
4. The average caseload, and the average number of children (if different) held by qualified social care workers in:

Frontline child protection assessment teams; and * Safeguarding teams for each of the last five years.
 

1. Children’s Services do not record the reason for a child being accommodated in such a way that it can be reported how many children have been accommodated specifically at the request (relinquishment) of a parent (birth or adoptive).

Therefore, to obtain this information would require a manual review of the records of all children accommodated. Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information 2000 does not oblige a public authority to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit. The appropriate limit is currently £450 or 18 hours at a cost of £25 per hour.

The exemption under section 12 is not subject to the public interest test

Any refined request will be treated as a new request under the Freedom of Information Act.

2. Children’s Services do not record the presenting category of concern at the point of a referral to Children’s Social Care. Therefore, obtaining this information would require a manual review of the records of all children accommodated.

3. Using the annual social worker census for the DfE which is for the year ending 30th September the last 5 years figure of Days lost per FTE, which is how we report sickness were:

2025 7.57

2024 6.62

2023 6.16

2022 11.02

2021 11.36

4.