KEY POINTS:
Child Youth and Family (CYF) has come under fire over the apparent high number of times children in government care were being shifted.
National MP Anne Tolley said today figures showed 1000 children in CYF care had been moved three or more times in the past year.
Social workers are doing their best to ensure the stable placement of children taken from their parents' care, CYF Minister Ruth Dyson said.
Mrs Tolley highlighted the case of a six-year-old Manawatu boy who had been moved 11 times in the year, a five-year-old Hastings girl moved nine times and a two-year-old Whenuapai girl who had been moved seven times.
One 14-year-old boy had been moved 43 times in total while in the CYF's care.
"You are destroying those lives and confining those children to either a life of drug and alcohol abuse or a life time of crime."
Mrs Tolley asked how the department was going to create more stable placements for the children in the next year.
Ms Dyson told Parliament's social services select committee the figures did not give an accurate picture of shifts, as each time a child went to a respite carer to give foster parents a short break, it was recorded as a movement.
Ms Dyson said using respite carers allowed high-needs children to stay with one set of foster parents by giving them an occasional break.
CYF was already doing its best to ensure relative "permanency" of placements.
If possible it placed children with other family members, but that was not always possible.
CYF head Ray Smith said many uplifted children had serious behavioural problems which were challenging for foster parents.
But achieving stable placements was one of CYF's core aims and it was now in a good position to focus on improving the quality of its outcomes.
Unallocated abuse notifications were at 500 at the end of March, down from 4000 three years ago. There were no longer any "urgent" or "critical" unallocated cases.
He said he believed the number of children in CYF's care had peaked and, with the department's policies "starting to bite, and in coming years there would be a decline.
The number of children in CYF care in the Wellington region had dropped by about 100 over the past year.
Meanwhile under questioning from National's families spokeswoman Judith Collins, Ministry of Social Development (MSD) chief executive Peter Hughes said initiatives to target intergenerational welfare dependency were going well.
MSD's work in the area came under scrutiny after the killing of three-month-old sons Chris and Cru Kahui in June last year.
Mr Hughes said an initiative -- Vulnerable Families -- was now working with 69 families and up to 200 children in nine communities.
It brought together all the Government agencies working with the at-risk families and tried to put together a unified plan to address their problems.
The initiative was seeing good results and would hopefully be rolled out to 50 communities by the end of the year.
- NZPA
