SIGNIFICANT problems continue with recruiting social workers for the Bournemouth, Christchurch, and Poole area.

Staff shortages have led the authority to start recruiting from abroad, as has neighbouring Dorset.

Several councillors have now queried if the council’s pay and incentive packages are adequate, given the relatively high cost of living in the area.

The council currently has two specialist recruitment agencies working for it trying to find extra staff and is also using more agency staff than it intended, at a higher cost, to cover vacancies.

The current budget allows for a £3million spend on agency staff including 20 managers and 40 social workers, although the council has a policy to reduce agency staff numbers.

Cllr Mark Howell said internal reports suggest the recruitment problems are continuing despite a fresh recruitment campaign and extra external help to find new workers.

Council leader Cllr Drew Mellor says much of the problem is down to a national shortage of qualified social workers although he says that all the vacant manager positions in the children’s services department have now been filled after a long period of using agency staff, with an associated long-term saving.

“We have been recruiting overseas and there are some good examples of where that is working well,” he told the council overview and scrutiny board.

He said that further work was being explored into ways of working with universities, including Bournemouth, which has a social work department, to “grow our own” – although that process can take three years with another supervised year in practise.

Cllr Howell has called for a comparison of rates paid locally and regionally to social workers with a view to considering offering extra payments if the local pay package is found to be out of line.

“We are paying significantly more to use agency staff…it could be that we could use that to pay our own staff more,” he said.

Similar problems are said to exist in recruiting social worker in adult care although health and adult social care overview committee chair Edwards said that believing agency workers were only motivated by the extra money was often not the case.

“Some may do it because they want to work part time, or only for certain hours,” she said.

Last year, following criticism of the authority in an Ofsted report, an additional £7.5m was pumped into the council’s social work teams.