Croydon Council has blamed misleading statistics for wrongly putting its social services department among the worst performing 14 in the country.

The council claims it was unfairly penalised for being late with four critical indicators and that it's real position is mid-league. And it says the Department of Health knew the real position at least four weeks before the secretary of state made his controversial announcement at a conference in Harrogate.

The four delayed indicators should have been marked as acceptable, meaning that Croydon would have had nearly 60 per cent of its indicators in the acceptable or better categories. A statistical re-run by the Department of Health has confirmed that this would have lifted Croydon out of the worst performing authorities.

Councillor Paul Shaw, Croydon's cabinet member for social service said: "Clearly it was remiss of us not to get the data to the Department of Health in time. Given the repercussions, that was an oversight that we will not repeat. But having held our hands up to that, it was grossly unfair and inaccurate for Croydon to be publicly labelled as a poor performer.

"I recognise the value of independent assessment and I believe this is a more acceptable way of examining performance rather than pure number-crunching. "However, I am very pleased that the Department of Heath analysis acknowledges that had our data been inputted correctly, then Croydon would not have been erroneously branded as a poor performer."

December 4, 2001 10:01