An experience of the limits of the state

Do we see the limits of the central state in the failures of the child protection system?

No-one should be surprised by the recent RNZ report that the “number of young people being abused in state care has increased”. In 2006, Prime Minister Helen Clark, so it was rumoured, lost faith in Child Youth and Family (CYF), the precursor to Oranga Tamariki, after its Chief Executive was asked three times “How many children are in care?” and could not provide an answer. She decided to merge CYF with the Ministry of Social Development (MSD. I don’t know if the rumour about numbers is true, but nothing that happened after the merger made it implausible.

My membership of the Peter Hughes fan club lapsed a long time ago, but here MSD and its management cannot be faulted. Ray Smith, one of New Zealand’s better operational Chief Executives, was put in charge of CYF; he obtained extra funding and sent in a raft of MSD people to build capability in the organisation. I was one of those MSD people.

I could not tell you how to be a child protection social worker, but bureaucracy I know. The infamous party organiser in a beer manufactory would have been embarrassed to have CYF on his CV. Two examples to illustrate.

Typically, care is short term, but where intended to be long term, CYF had a “permanency policy”. To implement this policy CYF produced a booklet that listed services care givers could expect from the state. That would be all fine except for one problem. The booklet was a wish list. Not only did CYF have no idea if those services were available, it never checked if it could pay for services that did exist.

To understand the full horror of this, imagine being one of the kind people who agree to care for children whose parents cannot or will not look after them. Imagine how psychologically damaged, “difficult”, some of those children will be. Imagine how important and re-assuring a long list of help would be. Now imagine, after you have brought the child into your home and call on that help, it turns to be fantasy fiction. But you are still responsible for the wellbeing of the child …

A second example had an element of comedy. A few years before CYF was taken over by MSD, a baseline review revealed “systemic problems with Child, Youth and Family, unclear outcome priorities and variability in the quality of service concluded”. One consequence of that review was investment in better IT.

Lack of communication between agencies is often cited by coroners as a reason vulnerable children die, so it is plausible better IT might make a difference. Except this was CYF buying the IT… The system they bought was designed to be an electronic version of a paper filing system. This was before picture search tools were widely available, so by design, searching the electronic case notes was impossible.

A few years later, around 2012, I was in a consultation on social investment with charities. One medium sized charity explained an IT expert had worked for them pro bono and added a feature where one click of a mouse key would generate an email notification for CYF a child was at risk. Even in 2012 autogenerated emails were in not cutting edge, but easy, routinised information exchange was exactly what those coroners had recommended.

The problem: CYF could not handle emailed notifications. They had to be faxed! So the organisation with a budget close to a billion dollars forced a charity run on donations and goodwill to print off autogenerated emails so they could be faxed. Where, of course, they were scanned into an electronic filing system of documents that could not be searched.

These were the tip of an iceshelf of failure. CYF was not so much dysfunctional as afunctional. They employed some nice people, some highly competent, but the culture of CYF’s central office was to take pride in its failings. When I asked about the IT system, I was told this was “a system for social workers, not imposed on theme” (emphasis in the original telling). In other words, the department was fully aware they had rendered the new IT useless. They felt that made it better. When I pointed out to someone in CYF their approach to permanency services was a problem, the response was “well the services should be there”. A great comfort, I am sure, to the carers.

For a minion like me this was a challenge. For Smith, taking responsibility for the mess was potentially career destroying. After the subsequent 20 years of rebranding, uplift scandals and CYF’s, frankly disgusting, role in supporting the state’s response to abuse of children in care, it is reasonable to ask: did any efforts make a blind bit of difference?

To be clear, this is not a criticism of Smith or MSD’s senior management. Treasury led an effort that failed before them. Ministers led efforts that failed after them. MSD’s efforts fit a decades long pattern.

At some point we have to ask if the model, a system run by the central state, is the issue? Maybe those in Iwi or other non-government organisations could do a better job. Maybe local government institutions? This is not a call for “privatisation” - a term that in NZ would appear to include every organisation not in direct command and control of the Public Service Commissioner - but to ask if the knowledge of local people and their local government institutions might be better for children?

What we can say is children in Ashburton, Papatoetoe, Napier and elsewhere appear to benefit little from bureaucrats in Wellington doing departmental reports and re-organisations. In offices on The Terrace, Bowen Street and its environs, hundreds of clever, hard working people have looked for decades for the magic spell that would fix the system. It seems not to exist.

Actually it’s not quite true to say the work in 2006 had no benefits. A couple of years later, my partner and I had a child. All my family except us three live in the UK, so after a serious accident there was a real chance - risk? - CYF might have been responsible for our child’s care. That was a horrifying thought. We wrote a list of people who should care for her and made sure everyone knew about it. In other words, we did what any good middle class civil servant does: used my inside knowledge of the state to insulate against its ineptitude.