Social service agencies wary of sharing CYFS workload

Some social service agencies say they will refuse to "prostitute" themselves by taking part in a plan to farm out possibly around half the children notified to Child, Youth and Family Services (CYFS).

The controversial plan, due to go before the new Parliament, is designed to help CYFS cope with an increase in notifications of suspected child abuse and neglect in the wake of recent high-profile tragedies.

Some agencies welcomed the plan at a conference in Auckland of the Association of Child and Family Support and Community Services.

But the director of Catholic Family Support Services in Hamilton, Carole Fleming, said she was "frightened" to see agencies accepting CYFS cases just because they needed the money.

"At a hui of the providers in Wellington in July, the overriding agenda people had was solely money," she said. "Our organisation made a conscious decision not to pick it up. We declined to contract. The term 'prostituting ourselves' was applied.

"We were being asked to undertake assessments, but our strengths are in support, and it seemed strange to us that money was being made available to provide assessments and investigations."

Quentin Jukes of the Warkworth agency Homebuilders said his group would also refuse to do CYFS assessments because it believed in working alongside families as equals, not threatening to take children away from them as CYFS did.

"If CYFS has money to do this work, which it must if it is contracting with us to do it, why are they not doing it themselves?" he asked.

"Preventative work is where our real skills lie as a sector."

He noted that a CYFS speaker at the conference had confirmed that private sector companies, as well as non-profit agencies, would be eligible to take on CYFS investigations.

"We are seeing the opening of the door to privatisation," he said.

"My prediction is that in two years' time, as demand management gets going and there is a real shortage of workers in our sector, people are going to be leaving CYFS and setting up private companies and coming back in and doing that work."

However Trevor Batin of Christchurch's Home and Family agency, who is chairman of the association, said many of the children referred to CYFS would prefer to deal with a community agency that had time to look into all the needs of the family.

Moyna Fletcher of Parentline in Hamilton said her agency had lobbied since 1999 for CYFS and community agencies to work together to support families in trouble.

"It takes a village to raise a child," she said. "We have the resources. We have the ability to be able to do it. Let's get behind it."

A speaker from the floor said a Presbyterian Support worker in Invercargill had gone out to meet a family that had been notified to CYFS and was met at the door by the husband and a lawyer.

"The family were expecting CYFS, and there was going to be no engagement," she said. "But because [Presbyterian Support] was a non-government organisation and worked from a strength-based model, they were able to get an agreement from the family to get in the door and start working with them.

"It's a prime example of where NGOs can go and CYFS can't go."

CYFS chief executive Paula Tyler denied reports that 60 per cent of notifications would be farmed out to community agencies under the new plan.

The service plans to pilot the new arrangements in four locations from next month before deciding on how the system will work nationally.