Mr. Bernard Gloster:

The Deputy has covered a good deal in that. First, regarding social workers having time to work with children directly, the Deputy is 100% correct on that point. Social workers say that to me all the time. Young social workers, in particular, who come to work for us get very frustrated about that. Some of them record up to 60% of time is spent either on administrative work or on other matters. Two elements drive that. The first is the regulatory compliance levels the agency now has to meet. In saying that, I am not saying regulation is a bad thing. We all know where it came from. It is a very important part of the feature of safe personal social services given our history but there is no doubt our laborious methodologies make that worse than it is. As I referenced in my opening statement, this year we will introduce the new replacement national childcare information system, NCCIS. We estimate that will reduce computer screen time for a social worker managing a case by approximately 20%. I could stand to be corrected on that. It is social workers who have been involved in designing that and I hope that in time, that will contribute. There is also a second element, which the Deputy will probably know about, which has made a difference. Social workers have told us this. In the past two years we have assigned 45 or 50 extra clerical staff to directly supporting teams. This year we will assign more. Because we cannot get all the social workers we want we have asked social workers what would help with that and it is more administrative support. However, the Deputy and I both know the administrative support can only do so much. The social worker will still be pulled on.

On the 5,150 figure, I would dearly love to say to the Deputy it is a direct target linked to a direct assessed level of need and response to need. It is not. It is an incremental growth from what we know is well below what we need. We still need to do more of that. Regarding starting to introduce some evidence-base to that, Ms Duggan will speak briefly on the resource allocation model we now use for that.