More restructuring planned for CYFS

The sudden resignation last year of Canadian Paula Tyler as head of the Department of Child Youth and Family Services was the catalyst for another major restructuring of the state's social work agency.

The troubled department will be folded into the Ministry of Social Development, which is slowly turning back into something similar to the old Department of Social Welfare.

The moves comes about 6 years after CYFS was created as a stand-alone agency under National and follows Labour's preference for operational and policy functions under one roof.

The Ministry of Social Development itself was a merger of the old Department of Work and Income (Winz) and the stand-alone Social Policy Agency.

Paula Tyler announced her resignation after only 11 months in the job and an extensive international recruitment drive. She followed her husband back to Canada where he had a new job.

She had replaced Jackie Pivac who quit after a critical review of CYFS.

At the post-Cabinet press conference yesterday, Prime Minister Helen Clark made reference to the leadership of the Ministry of Social Development under Peter Hughes as a factor in the merger decision.

She also said that the difficulty involved in recruiting another new chief executive was a factor.

"We had not found it easy to recruit the time before and then there was obviously a sense of disappointment that the appointee didn't stay very long and there wasn't a preparedness to go back down that road unless we had to."

The Government had felt it was time to address the difficulties that some of the stand-alone agencies faced in being distanced from policy work.

"Where you have an operational department that doesn't have a policy arm, you don't have operations adequately and immediately enough informed by policy."

CYFS has about 2600 staff. The Ministry of Social Development has about 6400.

The welfare agency manages about 5000 children in care, conducts 35,000 statutory investigations and receives 53,000 notifications a year.

The merger will take place on July 1.

Mr Hughes said he expected "minimal" redundancies.