Better-funded CYF could save state plenty

Mike Williams

THE latest review of Child Youth and Family (CYF) is a shocker and will almost certainly result in yet another restructuring of the service.

This time some fundamental questions must be asked and I was encouraged by the reaction of the Minister, Anne Tolley. She spoke of a "back to the basics" approach and challenged some sacred cows, like the belief that a child is always better with its blood relatives - family or whanau.

The minister's wise suggestion that women who have multiple children under CYF care should be targeted for contraceptive advice was ridiculously interpreted by some journalists who should have known better as enforced sterilisation. I replayed the minister's words on this topic and nowhere did she go further than to advocate counselling.

In the same week, JustSpeak, a network with an interest in the criminal justice system, published some statistics about youth offenders.

These, too, were a shocker.

JustSpeak found that of the young offenders, 92 per cent had a learning disability and 53 per cent showed symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

In the same sample, 88 per cent will be reconvicted within five years and 71 per cent will be reimprisoned within the same period. In other words, young offenders will become grown-up jail inmates.

How this report links up with and strengthens the need to improve outcomes for kids in the care of CYF is shown in the statistic that 83 per cent of these young offenders have a CYF record, indicating previous interventions.

Thus we appear to have a child protection system that is providing nearly eight out of 10 young offenders.

It's important to put all this into context. According to the trust, Child Matters, there were, in 2013, 5188 children in the custody of the chief executive of the Ministry of Social Development of which 4129 children are living in "out of home" placements, though there were nearly 150,000 "reports of concern" to CYF in that year.

So it seems that we, as a society, are not bad at reporting suspected incidents of child abuse but that when the worst comes to the worst and kids are taken into care, the outcomes are terrible, and costly.

If 83 per cent of offenders in the youth justice system are CYF kids, you can bet that this statistic is reflected in the overall prison population.

It's all too easy to blame dysfunctional drug and alcohol-addled parents, but this gets us (and the kids) nowhere and we are all bearing the costs of this clear failure by the current CYF model through our taxes.

It bears repeating that a prisoner, now costing $2000 per week, is the most expensive beneficiary we have.

When the highly critical report into CYF was first released, Minister Tolley reacted by saying that "we won't throw money at the problems" but, within a week, was conceding that spending in this area may have to increase.

My view is that Anne Tolley has a really good argument to take to Finance Minister Bill English for the next Budget round.

Mr English, himself, has introduced some new thinking into social spending which he defines as the "forward liability investment approach".

Essentially this means that social spending, like state housing, benefits and child protection, should be at least partly evaluated by its ability to reduce the state's liability for expenditure in the future.

One obvious example of this approach is insulating and heating state houses. If the Government spends money here, then pressure is reduced on the Government's health budget through fewer respiratory problems among tenants in the future.

If a proper accounting were undertaken, it may well turn out that a better-funded and organised version of CYF would heavily reduce the Government's "forward liability" for imprisonment, benefits, heath costs and a host of other costs to the state.

The organisation of CYF also needs a hard look. It appears from the report that only a quarter, or 750 of the 3000 CYF staff, are what you'd call "front line". The rest seem to be the bureaucratic back-up to an overworked minority.

A small success for "forward liability" happens in the Bay. The Howard League has helped more than 100 second-offender unlicensed drivers to get their licences. Paying a teacher for a year and funding texts, licence tests and some driving instruction has cost us close to $100,000.

If the Howard League has stopped just half of these offenders from re-offending and then serving a jail sentence of, say, three months (and this could be established by research) then the state has saved a minimum of $1.2million. This doesn't count the savings from beneficiaries who, with a licence, then get a job and go off the benefit.

That's a pretty good "bang for buck" by anyone's reckoning.

-Mike Williams grew up in Hawke's Bay. He is chief executive of the NZ Howard League and a former president of the Labour Party. He is a political commentator and can be heard on Radio NZ's Nine to Noon programme, at 11am Mondays, and Sean Plunket's RadioLive show, 11am, Fridays. All opinions in this column are his and not those of the newspaper.