Ms Kate Duggan:

I will not repeat all the concerns about special care that have just been referred to because we share them. This is very much around the capacity issue in terms of being able to have an adequate number of special care beds open at any one time. We are operating at about a 50% to 60% capacity at any one time in terms of the staff available to us, but this is very much around the complexities of the children and young people being referred to special care. When they are in that safe, secure environment, getting access to therapeutic supports, they make progress, but it is very difficult to identify a placement that offers the same level of therapeutic supports to transition them out. That is certainly something we are focusing on, and it links back into Deputy Costello's question about the planning or the anticipation work. Last year we developed our strategic plan for foster care and our strategic plan for residential care. At that point in time, in 2022, we identified the need for, at the very minimum, an additional 110 residential care beds over three years. We have already, since that period, purchased an additional nine properties to open as residential units. They are at various levels of coming on stream. We know that the most significant challenge for us will be to be able to resource those units and identify the staffing for them.

What we see within that is that we are also operating in a context and an environment where, because of the increased demand in respect of separated children and unaccompanied minors, we have also opened an additional four residential units to help care for the 233 young people who are in our care, in addition to supported lodgings and foster care. We now have a new perspective, even 12 months later, on the increased demand for our services in terms of the number of beds we will need available to us. We also know that over the past 12 months there has been a reduction of almost 40 residential beds. Thirty-six of those have been due to providers exiting the market, either in private provision or in the community and voluntary sector, due to staffing levels or due to a change in function and purpose in respect of those units. We also have at any one time five to ten beds that are not available to us because of court direction in respect of the needs of a specific young person to have either single or dual occupancy arrangements. We have a plan there and we know where we want to get to, but we are challenged by the property market and the ability to recruit to and resource those units. We are working very hard to do that. We have a social care graduate campaign ongoing. There are 220 social workers qualifying this year, and we have secured 163 of those as permanent posts. There is a lot of work taking place to increase our capacity.

We also very much support the right to advocacy and the need for advocacy. We support EPIC to provide advocacy for children in care services. We also fund legal representation through EPIC, which is very important to us. As part of our new guidelines in supporting separated children and unaccompanied minors referred to us, we have now contracted an advocacy service to support those young people and to ensure that they have advocacy services. Obviously, however, we remain challenged in terms of increasing that level of support that is available.