Mr. Fred McBride:

I thank the Deputies for their questions. I said earlier that we need to get better at ensuring that people who refer matters to us are kept in the loop so they know what is happening with that referral, even where they do not perhaps have an ongoing role to play. When teachers, public health nurses or gardaí refer matters to us we often want them to continue to be involved in supporting the child and the family. We do not want them to just give us a piece of information and then walk away. We want them to stay involved. That is the reason we invite them to a range of multi-agency discussions, child protection case conferences and child care reviews if the child is in care. I am very open to these other agencies playing a full part where it is appropriate in the ongoing care of these children and families. However, I have acknowledged that we need to get better at keeping people in the loop. If we do not see that there is a further role for them we do not always keep them informed of what we are doing about the situation, and there is scope for us to do that. I accept that.

We take concerns from outside sources seriously. I can give an assurance, as far as an assurance can be given, that where we deem a situation to be high risk and a child in some type of imminent danger we will remove that child. The HIQA inspections across the piece relating to child protection and welfare have all said that where a child needs an immediate protective response they get one. All of the reports have said that. I can offer that level of reassurance.

However, as I said, there are many decisions which are not at all clear cut in regard to balancing risk against the damage that might be caused by removal. These are delicate balances of judgment. We have to weigh up evidence, information and the impact on the child. An independent judgment has recognised that if a child is at immediate risk, we take immediate action. That is reflected in HIQA inspection reports.

In regard to how many staff we would need to clear the unallocated list, we have a caseload management system which tries to keep social workers' caseloads at a manageable level. If we were able to recruit all the social workers we could recruit within our current investment level and do something about the retention issue, we could reduce the unallocated cases very significantly. I do not know whether the list would ever get down to zero because there will always be a time gap between a referral being made and its being responded to. However, we are confident that if we address those recruitment and retention issues within the investment that we have, we can get those unallocated cases down significantly. We have introduced a further category of case which we are calling being actively worked on duty. The duty team or intake team, which the committee has heard us mention a couple of times, is the team that deals with initial referrals. Of the 5,000 cases Deputy Rabbitte mentioned, between 1,500 and 2,000 are being actively worked on and we have criteria to define what that means. To that extent, I could argue that they are not unallocated.

The children in those may have more than one social worker visiting them, which I accept is not ideal, but there is not nothing happening with these cases. People are monitoring, visiting and working to progress the safety plans. If one took that 2,000 as a separate category, then the figure of 5,000 unallocated cases would come down to 3,000. Therefore, we are already beginning to make inroads into that. There has been some recent evidence that the number of unallocated cases was beginning to go up after about two and a half years of constant reduction and we are trying to diagnose the reason for that. It is in the context of increased referrals, as I mentioned earlier, which means more business is coming in our front door. However, we are considering how we prioritise these cases and, as I said, a significant proportion of them are being actively worked by a team rather than an individual social worker. We have been slightly unkind to ourselves by calling them unallocated as they are being actively worked. I am not trying to play silly with the figures, I am just trying to be absolutely clear and honest with you about the reality for some of those children's cases.