Robert Troy (Longford-Westmeath, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this Bill, which Fianna Fáil welcomes. It is an overdue step in the right direction and towards the ultimate goal of full legal entitlement to aftercare services for all young people leaving State care and foster care.

This legislation has been drafted in response to long-held concerns, including concerns over insufficient policy direction, focus and co-ordination of aftercare services as well as an absence of structured and consistent service planning for young people leaving State care.

The question we have to ask is whether this Bill achieves these objectives. I welcome and support the main goal of the Bill which is to introduce a statutory duty on Tusla to provide an aftercare plan for young people leaving care. It is essential that this statutory obligation to provide these young people with an aftercare plan being placed on Tusla should be regarded as simply a first step. There is a risk that the Department may use this legislation as a ruse to distract from the wider issue of adequate service planning for aftercare. It is my belief and that of care organisations such as Empowering People in Care that this Bill does not go far enough in obliging Tusla to put forward a full service framework and the necessary resources for aftercare. It is unfortunate that on Committee Stage in the Seanad the Government ruled Fianna Fáil amendments to the Bill out of order.

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The Bill may not oblige the organisation to put in place fully resourced aftercare plans which are tailored to the individual needs of all vulnerable young people leaving State and foster care. I will address these issues in my contribution.

Many amendments to the Bill are required. I hope the Minister will engage with Opposition parties and outside groups which advocate for children in care and aftercare in order to facilitate an open discussion on the amendments required to strengthen and improve the Bill. I sincerely hope he will not take a bullish approach and rule amendments out of order for technical reasons, as he appears to have done in the Seanad.

We have a number of concerns about the eventual implementation of the legislation. As I said, the Bill gives Tusla an opt-out clause based on resources. Providing aftercare plans and services to young people leaving care is essential to safeguarding vulnerable individuals who lack the traditional supports young adults fall back on. Research by Empowering Young People in Care, EPIC, and others has shown that young care leavers are more likely to leave State care with poor coping mechanisms, poor education, poor life skills and a lack of support and friendships, leaving them more at risk of feeling isolated, suffering from mental health problems, engaging in risky behaviour, self-harm or suicide and becoming parents at a young age.

I was struck by what the Minister said about listening to people who have gone through the care system. A cross-party group on mental health recently held a presentation in the audiovisual room. During the course of the presentation, a woman who went through the care system and who now works with EPIC gave her personal experience for the benefit of legislators. She highlighted the deficiencies within the service and outlined how these could be addressed. In that context, I acknowledge that the Minister has accepted that he will engage with and listen to those who have gone through these services and know best what the issues are - they know far more about them than the Minister and I.

Between 400 and 500 young people leave care annually when they reach the age of 18. In 2014, 1,698 young people aged between 18 and 23 years were in aftercare. Some 946 were in full-time education. However, the most vulnerable group of children are those leaving residential care or short-term foster care placements. Children who come into care in their mid to late teens may not have developed the relationships with staff or aftercare workers that help them to achieve good outcomes.

While the Bill obliges Tusla to provide an aftercare plan for young people leaving care, section 8 gives the agency an opt-out clause. The section states that Tusla may limit the supports available to young people in aftercare due to a lack of resources and that the agency must also have regard to resources available to it in implementing an aftercare plan. It is a worryingly vague opt-out clause and seriously undermines all of the other provisions in the Bill, including the Tusla's statutory obligation to provide an individually tailored aftercare plan to all young people leaving care.

As the Minister well knows, Tusla has many statutory obligations which it is currently failing to meet either because of the lack of resources available to it or because of policy co-ordination and service management deficiencies. For example, it currently has a statutory obligation to investigate all child protection and abuse claims in a timely manner. On 2 November, however, the new Ombudsman for Children, Dr. Niall Muldoon, revealed some deficiencies in the protection and care system administered by Tusla. In his audit, he found Tusla managed to deal with just one fifth of all reports of child abuse in a timely manner, despite the fact that it had a statutory obligation to do so. By any measure, this is a gross systems failure on the part of the Minister and the management of Tusla. The latter was set up for the purposes of strengthening the child protection systems that existed under the HSE but we know it is failing in a massive way to immediately investigate child abuse claims. The new agency’s failure to protect vulnerable young people is widespread across its service remit, with the ombudsman also making the appalling disclosure that children with mental health issues are still being accommodated in adult psychiatric wards. Dr. Muldoon found that many children in distressing situation are simply being put on suicide watch and not being given the care, compassion and specialist treatment they require due to bed shortages.

I fear that we cannot simply rely on Tusla to provide adequately resourced after care plans. By giving Tusla the "as resources allow" opt-out clause, there is a risk that the Bill will not oblige the organisation to put in place fully resourced aftercare plans which are tailored to the individual needs of all vulnerable young people leaving care. We have concerns about whether Tusla will be able to implement this legislation. Will Tusla's budget enable it to undertake Its new aftercare remit? As I said, we have concerns that this Bill will be used as a ruse for the Minister and the Department to avoid putting adequate resources in place for aftercare services. Giving Tusla a statutory remit is not the same as putting place a fully resourced system of aftercare services and supports for all young people leaving care.

It cannot be denied that from its inception Tusla has been grossly underfunded as a service organisation. While the additional funding for Tusla in budget 2016 is to be welcomed, it is a relatively small increase and is required in order that services might just stand still. The additional allocation will not be enough for significant service improvements but we are introducing legislation to put on a statutory basis the need for an aftercare plan. The Minister has dramatically underfunded Tusla since its formation. Last year, Tusla was at least €18 million short of meeting day-to-day expenditure for the provision of social worker services alone. Other community programmes that receive their budgets from Tusla - including family resource centres, school completion programmes, domestic violence community groups and rape crisis groups, such as SAFE, and the Rape Crisis Centre - were the subject of savage cuts in 2014 and 2015. It also remains to be seen whether this relatively small increase for a very underfunded organization will be enough to rectify service gaps in social and child welfare services, as well as providing funding for community programmes, such as family resource centres and school completion programmes, that are on their knees as a result of the annual 5% reduction in their budgets since 2012.

HSE and Tusla funding for domestic violence services has been cut by 17% since 2012, while funding for the Commission for the Support of Victims of Crimes domestic court accompaniment service has been reduced by 26% since 2012. Support agency funding for counselling services has also been reduced by 47% since 2011. Funding required to support these services is tiny compared to the protection and solace they offer to women and children in impossibly difficult situations.

The debate on this Bill allows us to discuss a related issue, namely, who has statutory responsibility for young people and children who are homeless. Tusla does not currently have a statutory duty to provide all children in emergency accommodation with an in-reach plan, which ensures their practical access to education, recreation, health and social services.

The Bill represents an opportunity to oblige the agency to put in place such in-reach plans to co-ordinate services for families living in emergency homeless accommodation and to reduce the risk that a period of homelessness would have a long-term damaging effect on a child's upbringing and development.

It is unclear at present which organisation has responsibility for the 1,600 children in families who live in emergency homeless accommodation. It is shocking that Tusla does not have a statutory remit to co-ordinate care and in-reach plans for these children. The Government's dismal record on housing provision is creating a cohort of children growing up without a fixed abode. In 2013, a total of 20 families were becoming homeless in Dublin every month. In recent months this has more than tripled, with more than 60 families becoming homeless every month. At present there are ten homeless families with children for every 100,000 people in Ireland. By comparison, there are only three homeless families for every 100,000 people in England.

It is shocking that Tusla does not bear any special statutory responsibility for putting in place in-reach plans to promote normal development and reduce the risk to the welfare of children in emergency homeless accommodation. Such care plans are essential in this extraordinary period of these children's lives to ensure they have co-ordinated access to social and educational services and to enable them to lead as close to normal a life as possible.

The Minister’s response to a parliamentary question I submitted recently effectively denies his Department has any responsibility to children who are homeless unless they are first reported to child welfare and protection workers. I was always led to believe by the Minister and his predecessor that the Department of Children and Youth Affairs and the new agency, Tusla, were not simply going to be about reacting to problems but they were to be proactive and intervene before a problem manifests and gets so complicated it needs much more support. The Minister's reply to the parliamentary question on the issue stated:

Policy responsibility for homelessness, insofar as it extends to my Department, relates to children under 18 and any child welfare and protection concerns that may arise in the context of the Child Care Act 1991. Young people who are homeless, either singly or as part of a family unit, and not falling within this category, are the responsibility of the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government, and local authorities ... With regard to putting in place special care plans for children experiencing homelessness, homelessness as part of a family group is not, in and of itself, a basis for seeking to receive a child into care.

As this response makes clear, Tusla has no special statutory responsibility to put in place care plans for children to safeguard development and reduce risks to their welfare arising from their family’s period of homelessness. The experience of homelessness and constant disruption is having a profound effect on these children's development, such as on their ability to access their school or GP, their contact with relatives or friends or simply being able to eat a meal in a regular environment.

Tusla should be taking a lead front-line role in safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children. The Bill is an opportunity to put in place a legal obligation on the agency to provide in-reach plans for co-ordinating and integrating all social services for these vulnerable homeless families and managing and reducing the risk that a period of homelessness would have a long-term damaging effect on a child’s upbringing and development.

I want to raise a question about early years services. The Bill includes provisions on early years services in sections 10 to 12, inclusive. The Minister stated that as Deputies are aware, revised preschool regulations are being finalised. What is the hold-up with publishing these regulations? They were promised by the Minister's predecessor following the "Prime Time" exposé, "A Breach of Trust". The regulations were promised as part of the quality improvement agenda almost two and a half years ago, but we have yet to see them published. In his reply, will the Minister tell us what is the delay?

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