Mr. Bernard Gloster:

Plans for the budget allocation for 2021 will be published in the 2021 business plan, which has not yet been finalised. We have only just heard the budget announcement. The board of the agency will consider the outline approach to allocating the funds we have for next year this Friday. To be clear, a significant portion of that €61 million has already been spent. The board of the agency will outline those plans after Friday. I will certainly have no difficulty in providing information on that approach to committee members, even ahead of the publication of the actual plan. We had particular costs this year and last year associated with disability cases in which there was also a child protection interest. That represented a significant part of our deficit.

With regard to consistency, the Chairman is correct. Approaching consistency across practice models has already been mentioned with regard to things like the child protection and welfare strategy, the Signs of Safety, and consistent approaches to family support. The real issue to pursue, which I mentioned in the opening statement and which I have mentioned to Tusla as many times as I could and to the Chair the first time I appeared before the committee in November 2019, is that Tusla is overcentralised, highly siloed and has an out-of-date structure for doing what the agency is charged with doing and tries to do.

We have designed a fully changed structure, which the board of the agency approved earlier this year, at the end of January. Since this involves changes to the structure of the agency and to some of the grading and positions involved in how the agency does its business, as opposed to money necessarily, it will require the approval of both the line Department, the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, and of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. It is between the two Departments at the moment. As I said, I am hoping that an engagement with the Minister very shortly will lead to a conclusion because implementing that type of change takes time and we really need to get on with it. We are, however, continuing will all other aspects of change in the meantime to try to improve consistency.

At the moment, we are operating in 17 areas where we have historically operated, divided into 32 smaller areas. These are supervised through four regional offices and co-ordinated through a national centre. The nature and type of response to cases will continue to be over-centralised. The system is heavily burdened. This adds to the impression of crisis given whenever there is an issue. Child protection systems in most jurisdictions do not operate in this way. There is no doubt but that there are many benefits to having a national agency, but we need to change the structure to achieve what we are attempting to achieve.