Herefordshire Children's Social Services Verbal and Written Warnings 2025
Case reference FOI2026/01937
Received 12 August 2026
Published 21 August 2026
Request
1. From 1st January 2025 to 1st January 2026, how many warnings (verbal or written) have been given to social workers by Herefordshire Council?
2. From 1st January 2025 to 1st January 2026, how many warnings (verbal or written) have been given to Children's social services staff by Herefordshire Council?
(I refer to council officers as all other employees from director level and below)
3. From 1st January 2025 to 1st January 2026, how many services users or members of the general public have made complaints against social workers or have been given to Child social services staff regarding the following (please provide separate figures for each):
a. Misconduct
b. Misfeasance
c. Perverting the course of Justice
d. Misleading Professionals
e. Fraud
f. Misinterpretation of Facts
g. Engineering Situations
h. Abuse of Authority
4. Does the council keep a register of written and/or verbal warnings to staff?
Response
1. From 1st January 2025 to 1st January 2026, how many warnings (verbal or written) have been given to social workers by Herefordshire Council?
2. From 1st January 2025 to 1st January 2026, how many warnings (verbal or written) have been given to Children's social services staff by Herefordshire Council?
(I refer to council officers as all other employees from director level and below)
3. From 1st January 2025 to 1st January 2026, how many services users or members of the general public have made complaints against social workers or have been given to Child social services staff regarding the following (please provide separate figures for each):
a. Misconduct
b. Misfeasance
c. Perverting the course of Justice
d. Misleading Professionals
e. Fraud
f. Misinterpretation of Facts
g. Engineering Situations
h. Abuse of Authority
4. Does the council keep a register of written and/or verbal warnings to staff?
Answer: The information for question 3 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. To ascertain the data requested, officers would need to manually check individual files for this information. An initial search has shown that there were 70 statutory complaints relating to children’s services and 73 corporate complaints relating to children’s services between 1 January 2025 and 1 January 2026, meaning 143 files would need to be checked for this information, and it is estimated that it would take 15 minutes to check each statutory complaint case and 5 minutes to check each corporate complaint case. Once the details had been identified this would need to be noted and once all files had been checked in this way, the total figures requested could be calculated.
This would at a conservative estimate take at least 23.5 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.
However, within the 18 hour limit, we can provide answers for questions 1, 2 and 4 as requested. Please advise us if this is something you require.
Documents
This is Herefordshire Council's response to a freedom of information (FOI) or environmental information regulations (EIR) request.
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