Children's Social Care Services
Case reference FOI2026/00305
Received 4 February 2026
Published 19 February 2026
Request
Q1. 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.
Q2. 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.
Q3. For each of the last five years, please provide either:
• 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), or
• 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.
Q4. 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. Please provide the information in written form via email. If you have any queries, please don’t hesitate to contact me, I would be very happy to clarify any aspect of this request.
Response
Q1.
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.
Q2.
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.
Q3.
For each of the last five years, please provide either:
• 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), or • 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.
Q4.
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.
Please provide the information in written form via email. If you have any queries, please don’t hesitate to contact me, I would be very happy to clarify any aspect of this request.
A: Regarding Q1 of your request, this information is not held in a form that would enable it to be located, retrieved and extracted within the Appropriate Time Limit which equates to 18 hours as defined by the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limits and Fees) Regulations 2004.
Our electronic reporting systems are unable to run a report for this information. Relinquishment is not a category we record, so the team would need to manually review all contacts we received to separate those relevent.
An initial search has shown that in 2025, we had 6783 contacts, and it is estimated that it would take 5 minutes to check each file.
This would at a conservative estimate take at least 565 hours to complete just for the year of 2025, and 10 times this for the previous 10 years as requested. Where the Limit is exceeded Public Authorities are not obliged to supply the information requested by virtue of S12 of the Act. Please take this letter as a refusal notice under S17 of the Act.
Regarding question 3 of this request, this information is not held in a form that would enable it to be located, retrieved and extracted within the Appropriate Time Limit which equates to 18 hours as defined by the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limits and Fees) Regulations 2004.
Our electronic reporting systems are unable to run a report for this information, therefore requiring a manual extraction and calculation of individual working patterns on a month by month basis over a five year period. Staff would need to extract 60 reports from their recording system which would take approximately 3 hours. The team will then need to sort the data in order to run the relevent calculations which would take a further 90 minutes. The team would then need to manually check individual work patterns to determine working days lost. This would take approximately 3 mintes per record, of which there are 420.
This would at a conservative estimate take at least 25.5 hours to complete. Where the Limit is exceeded Public Authorities are not obliged to supply the information requested by virtue of S12 of the Act. Please take this letter as a refusal notice under S17 of the Act.
The Service Area have advised that they could answer Q2 and Q4 within the limit, however in order to answer question 4 they would need the below clarification:
The Service Area have the following teams / services - please can you confirm how you would like the data to be grouped. As there is some overlap between how it is worded in your request and how our team interpreted the request:
Assessment & Support Teams
Safeguarding and Support Teams
Child and Young People Looked After Teams
Children with Disabilities Team
Please feel free to refine your request as above and I will approach the service area for the information.
Documents
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