Central Bedfordshire Council’s case study explores how the council overcame challenges in its adult social care workforce, particularly around the number and length of vacancies and the capacity of the workforce to meet increases in requests for care and support.
As CIPFA illustrated in Managing rising demand for adult and children’s social care (2024), councils throughout the country face rising requests for care and support, leading to increased expenditure and additional pressure on an already stretched social care workforce. Councils’ expenditure on adult social care agency staff has generally increased since the pandemic, with the BBC reporting some areas are seeing sevenfold increases.
Central Bedfordshire’s internal workforce strategy set out to reduce social worker vacancies, improve retention, reduce expenditure on agency staff and develop the adult social care career pathway. The council’s actions led to vacancies in social work and occupational therapy halving in twelve months, agency costs of almost £500,000 avoided and a strong evaluation of success from Partners in Care and Health (PCH).
The challenge
Managing the impact of the demographic pressures in Central Bedfordshire is a key challenge for the local authority and requires a skilled and resilient workforce.
Adult social care in Central Bedfordshire was facing significant challenges, with the capacity of the workforce arising from growing demands for care and support and the increasing complexity of care and support needs, as well as recruitment and retention challenges in the context of a workforce where key postholders are likely to be approaching retirement in the next five years. Since Q1 2022/23, we have seen a 23.4% increase in people known to adult social care and a 31.1% increase in services for those people.
To continue to provide excellent adult social care support, it is essential that we have the right people in the right place at the right time and with the right values, skills and experience to deliver the care and support needed both now and in the future. While turnover was relatively stable, the length of time that posts remained vacant had increased due to a reduced availability of skilled workers. With a vacancy rate of 21% and often having to advertise and interview more than once, posts remained vacant for up to nine months. The aim was to:
- reduce social worker vacancies
- improve retention
- reduce agency spend
- provide a clear, attainable and supported career pathway for otherwise qualified adult social care staff.
Through the development of a focused internal workforce strategy, we have identified key activities to improve and maintain the workforce.
The action
Central Bedfordshire Council took part in the strategic workforce planning sessions delivered by the Local Government Association (LGA), which helped us set the space for thinking, and an action plan was created to overcome the key challenges identified.
The adult social care workforce plan outlines how Central Bedfordshire Council will attract, retain and support the development of a stable, skilled and committed workforce that has the skills, knowledge and motivation to improve outcomes for the people we support.
This was followed by the Director of Adult Social Services asking for a critical friend appraisal of the workforce strategy led by PCH to inform improvement strategies. The feedback from the appraisal process further helped the adult social care directorate to prioritise areas for improvement and also helped with preparations for CQC assessment. Key high-level actions identified included the following:
- Continuous review of resource and capacity to meet demand.
- The creation of quality assurance posts in the quality team to support greater governance and meet new statutory obligations for assurance and compliance.
- Alignment of occupational therapists and social work staff within social care teams with primary care networks to further support integrated working.
- Support non-registered workforce to progress into registered roles.
- Develop new ways of working – provide support/training to managers to assist in maintaining connectivity and a positive culture to improve recruitment and retention.
- A targeted recruitment campaign for hard-to-fill posts.
- Promotion of social care as a career pathway.
- Development of future leaders.
The outcome
Outcomes and impact:
- In 12 months, vacancies for social work and occupational therapists reduced from 21.2% to 10.7%.
- Agency usage has reduced from 13.1% to 3.6%, with an associated reduction in spending of circa £479k.
- Ten social work apprentices, with three completing in 2024, and two occupational therapist apprentices.
A PCH evaluation of our work identified the following:
- A standout culture – a focus on creating a great place to work for the whole workforce.
- Strong ownership of the workforce strategy.
- Richness of data, quantitative and qualitative, which is well understood and informs the actions we take.
- Good recognition of the link between a happy workforce and good-quality care.
- Strong focus on equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI), with emerging work to ensure the issue of representation at more senior levels is addressed.
- An ongoing review to ensure the plan remains current and live.
- A strong sense of staff voice – not as a one-off to develop the workforce plan but as an “ongoing part of what you do.”
- Great examples of initiatives to support workforce experience and development, eg shadowing, mentoring, apprenticeships.
- A robust, joined-up approach around quality improvement that puts the voice of people being supported at its centre.
- Alignment across different strategies and recognition of the workforce plan as an enabler.
- An underlying theme that Central Bedfordshire is a “good place to work.”
Reflection
The key barriers to success were as follows:
- Funding was (and is) very tight, which prevents having the desired infrastructure to support more apprentices.
- The capacity to develop the apprenticeship programmes further.
- There was far more demand than places for apprenticeships.
The key conditions for success were as follows:
- Senior management team and team manager commitment and support.
- A highly competent learning and development (L&D) team.
- Workforce strategy and planning.
- High-quality and well-prepared apprentices and assessors.
- Very good collaboration with the university provider.
- Ease of movement between children’s social care and adult social care for apprentices.
7 July 2025
Contact information
Leire Agirre
Head of Safeguarding and Principal Social Worker
leire.agirre@centralbedfordshire.gov.uk
Andy Sharp
Director of Social Care, Health and Housing
andy.sharp@centralbedfordshire.gov.uk
