The chief executive of the county council has apologised for failing children and young people in Buckinghamshire.

Chris Williams, who on top of his basic £209,070 a year salary also receives £47,668 in pension contributions and £2,563 in benefits in kind, said the county’s children have not received the care they should have.

Mr Williams said: "I want to apologise to the children and young people of Buckinghamshire because they have not been as well served as they should have been by the county council and we have known about this issue for some time."

However, Mr Williams said he did not think it was a fair observation in the Red Quadrant report that the council was more concerned with improving its "tarnished reputation" than safeguarding children.

He added: "Because it was something that the Secretary of State had particularly picked up on the leader and other senior members felt that that was something that they needed to address and to demonstrate and argue that we did take safeguarding children and indeed adults very, very seriously - both in terms of our actions and in terms of our budget allocations.

"We were trying to address a very unfair and a very ill-informed, or rather ill judged comment, in the Ofsted report which was then picked up by the Secretary of State."

Mr Williams said two key points have been amended from the leaked draft report, although the official report is not able to be distributed until it has been approved by the Secretary of State.

Red Quadrant criticised the speed at which the council acted to implement change following Ofsted’s report.

However, Mr Williams said once he was alerted to concerns within the department, he acted swiftly in putting the "necessary building blocks in place".

The second point that Mr Williams said has been amended by Red Quadrant related to an internal management letter between the former director of children’s services, Sue Imbriano, and himself.

Mr Williams said that the implication of that letter, sent in January last year, was that no action resulted from it. However, he said that 12 more social workers were appointed and internal processes were altered - showing that action was being taken.

He added: "Ms Imbriano and I were doing things back in January, taking specific action from then on.

"We had brought in more social workers and were starting to turn things around. Ofsted came too soon for the full impact of those changes to be seen on the ground."

Mr Williams said the final version of Red Quadrant’s report will acknowledge this.

When asked whether he thinks the council acted quickly enough once concerns were raised, Mr Williams said: "I think we had a lot of work to do before we could get the improvement plan and the improvement board up and running."

Mr Williams said he has confidence the council can improve and added that a recent staff survey said they were "seeing the green shoots of change".