Patrick Costello (Dublin South Central, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I will start with the issue of private care, which the Minister has rightly identified as a huge cost for Tusla. Figures given to me recently show that 63% of young people in residential settings are in private residential units. This is a huge financial burden. We have seen a growth in private fostering placements and this has a significant marginal cost to Tusla also. The opportunity to place children into these settings is built on the fact that Tusla struggles with the recruitment of foster carers. Perhaps the Minister will give the committee some information on what is being done to reduce that private residential care and the private fostering bill, and the steps being taken for Tusla to meet its own recruitment.

I echo the Minister's words that the conversion of agency staff was a positive. There has also been a lot of investment by Tusla, which should be acknowledged, with investment in mobile working that facilitates social workers. While it reflects the rhythm of the social worker's chaotic day it also enables them to continue to work during Covid-19. These need to be singled out as positive steps. The Minister has got it right, however, in that the issue is not the recruitment, it is the turnover. What are we doing about turnover and about improving conditions for social workers? Part of this is Tusla still being stuck in fire fighting. Consider the number of unallocated cases and so on, and the struggle for early intervention. I am conscious that before he retired, and he was about three or two CEOs ago, Gordon Jeyes wrote a memo to Cabinet to say that without proper funding Tusla would struggle to meet its statutory requirement. In the intervening years we have seen it struggle to do that. I hope that with the next budget it can actually start to achieve those things.

On the key outputs for public service activities in the Estimates, I feel they are measuring the wrong things if we are trying to measure the success of Tusla. One of the things measured in these outputs is the percentage of children across all care settings to have a care plan. I understand the idea behind this but the reality is that I have seen cases where children are allocated a social worker, a care plan is done and then that social worker will move on to another child to do just a care plan. It is not necessarily a marker of stability of placement. Equally, we see an approval rate for relative foster carers, but what we should be looking at is an aim to recruit more foster carers and more relative foster carers. In parts of Northern Ireland, relative foster carers, or kinship carers, eclipse regular or general foster carers. That is part of a broader thing, but by measuring simply the approval rate we are missing huge issues in there. We should be looking at issues such as the turnover of social workers and how many have left, not just the recruitment. The reason many social workers are still with us is because they cannot travel to Australia due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The number of children in education would be a better marker of stability of placements than the success of Tusla, and equally, the number of placement moves.

I am conscious of my speaking time slipping away. Will the Minster give members an update on the timeline for a replacement strategy for better outcomes?