UK recruits desert child welfare

A QUARTER of international child protection workers recruited by the Brumby government have left the system.

A QUARTER of international child protection workers recruited by the Brumby government have left the system.

They have chosen to break their contracts rather than continue to work for the problem-plagued department.

Taxpayers forked out more than $800,000 to recruit the workers from Britain to help fill growing vacancies in the Department of Human Services as exhausted staff left in droves as caseloads increased.

Community Services Minister Lisa Neville confirmed to The Australian only 60 of the 81 staff recruited since late 2008 remained employed by the department.

Ms Neville travelled to Britain to help recruit the workers and $800,000 was spent on advertising and relocation costs.

Community and Public Sector Union industrial officer Mandy Coulson said many British child protection officers were shocked at the state of the system when they came here.

"Considering some of them came from the toughest boroughs of London, to have these workers say 'we are not going to stay in this system' says a lot about the state of the department," she said.

Ms Coulson said the British staff had either left the country or left the department and were now working in other community organisations.

The exodus follows claims management is placing enormous pressure on staff to close cases early and overlook others to reduce the number of cases on the politically damaging "unallocated list".

Opposition child protection spokeswoman Mary Wooldridge said the exodus of so many British workers was a further indictment of the failure of the DHS to keep children safe.

"Even experienced workers who have travelled thousands of miles from the UK to work in Victoria cannot stomach the incompetence and mismanagement of the Brumby government's child protection system," she said.

Ms Neville maintained yesterday that the recruitment of international staff had been a "successful campaign" that had a significant impact on many local offices in parts of the state that had difficulty recruiting workers.

She said the British staff who had left were liable to repay relocation costs.

"In accordance with their contracts, the Department of Human Services seeks to recoup the relocation costs where there are not extenuating reasons for the staff member to return to their country," she said.