Safeguarding policy

If you are worried about someone right now

If someone is in immediate danger, call 999. Do not use a form, do not email, and do not wait to speak to us first.

An adult at risk

Call the adult safeguarding team at the council for the area they live in. The council leads safeguarding enquiries for adults — that is its job in law, not ours, and it can act whether or not the person receives care from us.

A child

Call the children’s services or safeguarding hub at the council for the area the child lives in, or the police. For advice, or to raise a concern without giving your name, the NSPCC helpline is 0808 800 5000.

If you are a child or a young person

Childline is 0800 1111. Free, day or night, and it does not show on a phone bill.

If someone is struggling to keep going

Samaritans is 116 123. Free, any time.

A concern about a member of our staff

Tell the council’s designated officer for the area. You can do that without telling us, and you do not need our permission.

TBD — the councils we work with, so this page can name each safeguarding team and link to it directly. Until then, searching for the council’s name with “safeguarding” will reach the right team.

You can also tell us, and we would rather you did. But our enquiry form is not monitored around the clock, so it must never be the only place a concern goes.

The principles we work to

Six statutory principles govern adult safeguarding. They are not slogans; each one constrains what we may do.

Empowerment

People lead decisions about their own lives, and are asked what they want to happen.

Prevention

Acting before harm happens is better than responding after.

Proportionality

The least intrusive response that meets the risk. Overreacting takes away someone’s life as surely as underreacting fails to protect it.

Protection

Support and representation for those in greatest need.

Partnership

Working with councils, health services, the police and communities.

Accountability

Being answerable for what we did and did not do.

In practice this means Making Safeguarding Personal: we start from what the person wants to happen, not from a process. We would only override that where they lack the capacity to decide, or where someone else is at risk.

The ten kinds of abuse we look for in adults

All ten are named because a list that stops at the obvious ones trains people to miss the rest. Financial abuse and self-neglect are the two most often overlooked.

Physical abuse

Hitting, restraining, misusing medication, or withholding physical help.

Domestic abuse

Including coercive control, and including abuse by a family member who is also a carer.

Sexual abuse

Any sexual act without consent, or where consent cannot be given.

Psychological or emotional abuse

Threats, humiliation, controlling someone, cutting them off from other people.

Financial or material abuse

Theft, fraud, pressure over a will or property, misuse of someone’s money or benefits.

Modern slavery

Forced labour, servitude, trafficking.

Discriminatory abuse

Harassment or ill-treatment because of race, religion, disability, sexuality, sex, gender identity or age.

Organisational abuse

Neglect and poor practice arising from how a service is run — rigid routines, a closed culture, doing things for the rota’s convenience rather than the person’s. This is the one a provider must be most willing to see in itself.

Neglect and acts of omission

Failing to provide care, ignoring medical needs, withholding food, heating or help.

Self-neglect

Someone not caring for their own hygiene, health or surroundings. It is safeguarding, and it needs the most careful proportionality judgement of the ten.

What we look for in children

The four recognised categories are physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse and neglect. For the young people in our services, harm as often comes from outside the family as within it, and the guidance names these too:

Child sexual exploitation

Where a young person is given something — money, status, affection, drugs, somewhere to stay — in exchange for sexual activity. It rarely looks like coercion from the inside, which is why it is missed.

Child criminal exploitation, including county lines

A young person used to carry or sell drugs, hold money or weapons, or commit theft. A child found far from home with drugs is being exploited, whatever they have been told to say.

Child-on-child abuse

Bullying, physical violence, sexual harassment, sharing intimate images, and harmful sexual behaviour. Never dismissed as banter or as growing up.

Online abuse

Grooming, sextortion, coercion and bullying through phones and games.

Serious youth violence

Being drawn into violence, carrying a weapon, or being at risk from others.

Trafficking and modern slavery

Including young people who arrived in this country alone and are being controlled by someone who arranged it.

Mental capacity and liberty

We start from the assumption that an adult can make their own decisions. Where someone cannot decide something at the time it needs deciding, any decision made for them must be the least restrictive option available and in their best interests, and they must be supported to take part as far as they can.

Where care arrangements amount to depriving someone of their liberty, that has to be lawfully authorised. The operative regime for this is the Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards. The Liberty Protection Safeguards that were legislated to replace them were never implemented, and a further consultation is expected — so any policy referring to LPS as though it were in force is referring to something that does not exist.

Under review. In June 2026 the Supreme Court departed from the test that had governed this area since 2014, and what counts as a deprivation of liberty is now assessed differently. It is too recent for us to state a settled position, and this section will be updated once that has been worked through properly. TBD — confirmation of the effect from Bluebell’s legal adviser.

What happens when a concern reaches us

1. Make the person safe. Before anything is recorded or reported. If there is immediate danger, 999.
2. Record what was actually said, in the words used, on the day. Not a summary written later.
3. Tell the council. The council leads the enquiry, for an adult under the Care Act and for a child under the Children Act, and we cooperate fully with it. We do not investigate first and refer afterwards.
4. Notify our regulator of abuse or an allegation of abuse, without delay. This is our duty to the regulator and it runs alongside the council’s enquiry rather than instead of it.
5. Tell the person, and apologise. Where something has gone wrong in our care we are required to be open about it: to say what happened, truthfully, as soon as we reasonably can, and to apologise. That is the duty of candour, regulation 20 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014. An apology is not an admission of liability and is not a reason to delay one.
6. Support the person through what follows, and ask them what they want to happen.
7. Learn from it, including taking part in any safeguarding adults review or child safeguarding practice review, and changing what we do.

Where a concern is about a person who works with children, we refer it to the council’s designated officer within one working day — not after our own investigation, and not once we are sure.

For our children’s services there are additional duties to notify the regulator of serious events without delay.

The people we employ

Safeguarding starts at recruitment, before anyone meets anyone.

• An enhanced criminal record check for every role that requires one, including the children’s barred list for roles working with children and the adults’ barred list for roles delivering personal care to adults. Which list applies depends on the role in law — we may not request one that does not.
• Right to work, identity, and qualifications verified.
• Full employment history, with any gap explained, and references taken up directly from the referee.
• Safeguarding training before anyone works unsupervised, at a level appropriate to their role, and refreshed. No regulation sets a fixed interval for this, so the interval is a commitment we make rather than one we inherit. TBD — the interval Bluebell commits to.
• Regular supervision, so practice is seen rather than assumed.

TBD — the named safeguarding lead for adults’ services and for children’s services, and their deputy. This is the most important gap on this page: a policy without a name in it leaves everyone assuming somebody else is dealing with it.

If you work here and something is wrong

The law protects you. Report something in the public interest — abuse, neglect, a danger to people, a cover-up — and you are protected from being dismissed or treated badly for it, from your first day, with a right to go to an employment tribunal if you are.

Tell your manager, or go above them, or use the internal route that sits outside your line of management. You do not have to tell us at all, and you do not have to be sure.

Outside Bluebell: our regulator has a route for staff concerns, and Protect, the independent whistleblowing charity, runs a free confidential advice line on 020 3117 2520. For a concern about a child, the NSPCC has a whistleblowing advice line for professionals.

TBD — the internal contact, and the regulators’ current whistleblowing numbers. We have deliberately not printed numbers we could not verify from the organisations’ own published material: a wrong number on this page is not an inaccuracy, it is someone in a crisis reaching nothing.

About this policy

This page is the public summary. The full policy, with procedures, forms and internal contacts, is held by us and is available on request — commissioners and inspectors can have the whole thing.

TBD — the version, the owner, when it was last reviewed and when it is next due. No single rule sets a review interval for a provider running both adults’ and children’s services, so we will state our own, and review sooner after any serious incident, any review we take part in, or any change in the law. Two such changes are outstanding now, and both are noted above.