Ms Kate Duggan:

My colleague, Mr. McQuinlan, will give more details on voluntary consent.

One of the shared threads of the discussion today concerns the part of the proposed legislation that deals with the duty to co-operate. When we talk about some of the complex operational issues we face and, more importantly, the very complex situations children and families find themselves in, which include special emergency arrangements, the risk of child sexual exploitation or criminal exploitation, as well as the concerns we have regarding the delay in reunification and not being able to provide the level of support we want within the voluntary care context, it really comes down to the duty to co-operate and the need for the wider support of all State services and agencies. We have referenced this as something that needs more thought in terms of the language around it and the legislative basis. It is critical to what we are trying to do as a State agency in fulfilling our statutory obligations to care for children and take children into care. When we are faced with situations in which we have children and young people in our care and we are not able to access the appropriate services for them, that creates a bigger challenge. The outcomes of that include some of the issues we have raised today, including exploitation, delays in reunification, and children and young people going into special emergency arrangements.