‘Not appropriate’: Minister to remove at-risk kids from emergency hotel care

The NSW minister in charge of the troubled child protection system is stripping caring responsibilities from private providers who take too long to find permanent placements for kids stranded in high-cost emergency accommodation such as hotels.

The government has reduced the number of at-risk children in the most high-cost form of emergency accommodation by 42 per cent since September after the establishment of a specialist unit to speed up long-term placements.

NSW Minister for Families and Communities Kate Washington.Credit: Peter Stoop

The children, who the Sydney Morning Herald have previously revealed are as young as one year old, often spend hundreds of days in emergency care, known as an “alternative care arrangement”.

It often means staying in a hotel, where children are supervised only by unaccredited staff from for-profit labour-hire companies.

But 59 children have been moved from those forms of accommodation in the past five months, partly because of the establishment of a specialist team which undertakes “intensive family finding” to locate next-of-kin and working with private providers to find foster carers.

In some cases, the Department of Communities and Justice has begun taking back responsibility for children whose care had been managed by one of the many non-government organisations which are contracted by the government to place high-risk children in care.

In one case, the Herald understands two sisters aged 11 and 14 years old had been in emergency care for 118 days after their long-term placement fell through.

The sisters, one of whom has a significant disability, first entered out-of-home care in 2016, but were placed in emergency accommodation because their foster carers could not meet their needs.

But the department intervened after, it said, the non-government provider which was contracted to manage their care did only “minimal work” to find another foster placement.

Even after potential carers were identified, the department said that after “several months there was minimal progress by the NGO in authorising these carers and the children remained in the ACA for a total of 118 days”.

The NSW Families and Communities Minister Kate Washington has described the child protection system as “spiralling out of control”.

The government has yet to release substantial plans to reform the system, and on Sunday the Herald revealed more than 1000 foster carers had left the system in the past 12 months. There are 15,000 children in need of some form of care across the state.

Emergency care takes up a disproportionate amount of that funding – taxpayers spent some half a billion dollars on it in the past two years, and the cost of individual children in those arrangements can be as high as $2 million. The government said the reduction in emergency care had saved $49 million since September.

The role of NGOs in the labyrinth child protection system has been subject to increased scrutiny by the Minns government. About 80 children remain in alternative care arrangements, while there are about 435 children in various forms of emergency care.

Washington previously told the Herald that outsourcing key functions of child protection had cost taxpayers more overall, and pointed to a series of “perverse incentives” in contracts that meant the government is unable to force private providers to fill vacancies.

‘When I was sworn in as minister, I was shocked by the number of children and young people in these high-cost emergency arrangements.’

Families Minister Kate Washington

Amid skyrocketing costs and worsening outcomes for children, Washington said the establishment of the unit was an important positive step.

“When I was sworn in as minister, I was shocked by the number of children and young people in these high-cost emergency arrangements,” she said.

“I’ve made it very clear to the department and to the sector [that] these arrangements are not appropriate, and the NSW government will be doing everything it can to find stable, loving homes for these children.”

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