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

I have a lot of things to ask about but I will try to focus on five minutes' worth of issues. The agency conversion was good work and it has helped with that stability of staffing and workforce, which is so important for all sorts of reasons.

The investment in mobile working through laptops, remote access, Wi-Fi dongles and so on not only reflects the way social workers work and enables them to work but it has been a major benefit in the face of Covid-19 to enable working from home and working remotely. That has to be highlighted as a success of Tusla in recent years.

On the targets for the workforce, I would love to know more about the figure of 4,784 and how Tusla got that. If one looks at the UK, a huge amount of work goes into trying to estimate the demand for social work services, both in staffing and in fostering and recruitment. There are measures of flow in which one can guess the number of children who are likely to come into care based on demographics. We have measures for the pressure so we know how many cases a social worker should be carrying. Therefore, we should be able to work out how many social workers we need. However, what I hear from social workers on the ground is frustration at the lack of administrative support. The cases they carry still have a huge amount of paperwork. I hear frustration from some senior managers on a hiring freeze and a struggle to get posts filled. I would love to hear more about that kind of work from the witnesses because that ties in with all of the important points that were previously raised.

One of the other matters I would like to jump to is fostering. How many people within Tusla do nothing but recruitment? Recruitment of general foster carers is on a knife-edge.

We have an excellent system with excellent carers who provide an excellent service to vulnerable young people and it is really on a knife edge if we cannot keep recruiting. How many people do nothing but recruitment? How many of them come with a marketing or similar background? My concern regarding keeping the service going is that we will rely more on private fostering, which has a significantly higher marginal cost, and children placed in private care also tend to be placed further from their home, which has all sorts of other impacts. We also have huge runaway costs in terms of private residential units, so any information Mr. Gloster has on steps being taken on cost control for private fostering and private residential units would be useful.