Council misses four targets

Blackburn with Darwen Council is failing to meet four of its 44 key performance indicators, a progress update to the authority has revealed.

Councillors heard at a meeting of the ruling executive on Thursday night that, while 27 of these indicators were rated ‘green’ for being on or above a target set by the body, four of the council’s targets were ‘red’, or significantly below target.

These included key issues for the authority, such as dealing with adult safeguarding enquiries within 24 hours, or finding new foster carers for the roughly 375 children being looked after by the council.

Included in the Corporate Plan Report for the last quarter, which was signed off by the executive, were detailed explanations for why the council was failing in these four areas, with employee absences and occupational therapy assessments also falling into the red.

For adult safeguarding, where the council has set itself a one day target rather than the five day response goal set by other agencies, the report pointed out that the council had seen a sustained increase in concerns shared with them, reaching an average of 219 per month in the first three months of 2026.

The report also stressed that every single case is reviewed by a social worker each day to identify high-risk individuals and circumstances, although a staffing vacancy had made it harder to reach their one-day goal.

“Everyone that phones up on day one gets triaged,” Cllr Jackie Floyd explained at the meeting, adding that some cases require by law a multi-agency approach, which delays them beyond the one-day target.

On Thursday night, Council Leader Phil Riley explained that KPIs like this were ‘stretch targets’ to push the authority to continue improving its services.

The Labour leader said that this was also why the body had failed to meet its occupational therapy target, that 78 per cent of referrals are dealt with in 28 days. In the first three months of this year, only 49 per cent were dealt with in this timeframe.

This was in part because of the benchmark set by the council nine months before, when a number of agency staff were used to bolster the rate at which referrals were resolved for people who need help to stay in work.

The other two key indicators of where the council was ‘significantly’ below its own targets, foster care provision and staff sickness, were viewed as longer term issues that link to national trends.

Cllr Riley pointed to the county’s ‘aging population’ as one reason for the decline in the total number of foster families, which has fallen from 70 to 67 after 13 households fell out of the scheme, and only 10 new ones joined.

The leader’s report noted that 12 potential foster households were in the process of being approved, but this still falls far short of the net increase of 14 fosterers targeted by the council.

For council staff absences, the report noted that an average of 9.6 days were lost to sickness per employee in the year to April, 2026. Across just 139 of its employees, an average of 24 days were lost to illness.

This increasing level of sickness is continuing to ‘impact service delivery and place additional pressure on staffing budgets,’ the report stated.

Leader Riley called these absences ‘concerning’ but added, in regards to all four ‘red’ indicators, that ‘anything that jumps out and worries people will be dealt with immediately.’