BIRMINGHAM’S under-fire social services bosses spent £300,000 searching for computer software to record children at risk of abuse – only to discover that it didn’t exist.

After months of fruitless research they decided to stick with an existing IT programme – even though it cannot cope with more than 20,000 referrals each year.

Most of the money went to expensive consultants hired to recommend an Integrated Case Management System (ICMS).

The new system was supposed to reduce the hours social workers spend compiling reports on youngsters believed to be suffering sexual or physical harm – leaving them more time to talk with children.

ICMS was one of the key components of the council’s business transformation project, and should have cut costs by £18 million.

The failure to find an appropriate system means that frustrated staff have to enter the same information into nine different databases.

Inefficient IT systems have been one of the main criticisms against the council in several Government reports. Ofsted identified “significant weaknesses” in services for safeguarding vulnerable children in Birmingham earlier this year and described them as ‘inadequate’.