KEY POINTS:
Charity street appeals seem destined to continue despite a trumpeted 95 per cent increase in state funding for selected social services in the next three years.
Non-government agencies which will share in the extra state funding of $193 million a year by 2011 say there are so many
families needing their help that most of the money will go into reaching more of those in need.
Some of it will also go into paying their staff decent wages.
Social Service Providers Aotearoa executive officer Jocelyn Wilson said a survey last year found the agencies' biggest problem was recruiting and retaining social workers and other trained staff because their wages had fallen far behind those in the public sector.
"This will give us a way to try and address that so people will be able to be paid more competitive wages," she said.
The new policy, announced by Helen Clark on Tuesday, is for taxpayers to pay 100 per cent of the costs of "essential services which the Government would have to provide directly if the community couldn't".
The Ministry of Social Development said the policy would cover "essential community-based services for families, children and young people", including:
* All "essential services" funded by Child, Youth and Family Services the ministry's family and community services division and the Ministry of Youth Development.
* Parenting programmes funded by the Ministry of Education, which are transferring to MSD on July 1.
* Services for victims of crime funded by the Ministry of Justice.
* Anti-violence programmes for people who attend voluntarily and now pay fees. (People under court orders to attend are funded through the justice system).
The ministry said state funding for these services would rise from $203 million a year to $255 million in the financial year starting on July 1, and to $396 million by 2011 - a total increase of 95 per cent.
The effect on the 700 agencies who will share the money will vary.
Women's Refuges, which now get only 44 per cent of their money from the Government, can expect to more than double their funding.
At the other extreme, Barnardos chief executive Murray Edridge said the Government already funded about 75 per cent of his agency's family services, such as foster care and adoption, so the move to 100 per cent appeared to mean an increase of only about a third.
The policy does not affect other areas of Barnardos work such as its early childhood education services.
"In everything we do we have unmet demand, so we have families we are not seeing because we haven't got the resources," he said. "So the ability to expand our volume is the single most important thing we can do [with the extra money]. If we continue to raise money, it just means we can continue to do more of what we do."
The manager of a small Warkworth-based agency Homebuilders, Quentin Jukes, said the Government paid for about half of his agency's work, which included intensive work with about 200 families and contact with 1500 others in the past year.
He spends much of his time raising the other half of the money from about 20 philanthropic trusts such as the ASB Trust and Lotteries.
"If our funding is doubled, I hope we'll be able to greatly reduce that, and that might free it up for other people," he said. "The reality is that the core contracts for groups such as ours have hardly shifted at all in the last eight to 10 years, apart from the occasional small increase. They certainly haven't kept up with inflation in a way that would allow us to pay our workers in line with other social workers and counsellors."
Nationally, Council of Christian Social Services executive officer Trevor McGlinchey said a large proportion of church social work had never been funded by the Government and that would not change.
"A lot of the work that is being done, particularly the preventive work, is being delivered because communities think it needs to be delivered, not because it's a flagship programme of a government department," he said. "That kind of funding will still be coming from the churches' fundraising activities, including the regular appeals and also the funds that they hold in trust and the legacies that are left to them."
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