MORE than $25 million from the 2012-13 ACT Budget will be pumped into the Community Services Directorate to meet the deficiences identified by two Public Advocate reports.

The Government has been spurred into the funding promise in response to two reports by Public Advocate Anita Phillips; the first an interim report release last October and the second,”Review of the Emergency Response Strategy for Children in Crisis in ACT”, released yesterday.

Community Services Minister Joy Burch said more than $15.3 million over three years will be invested in the out-of-home care system for children and young people, including residential care, kinship care and foster care, $5.3 million over four years for additional care and protection workers and $5.5 million over four years for youth justice services including therapeutic services and outreach programs.

Ms Burch released the Government’s response to the Public Advocate’s Report today, and agreed with six of the seven recommendations, and agreed in part to the recommendation for the development and formalisation of on-going review mechanisms.

In the response, the Government agreed to: develop a staff training and development regime and ensure that this meshes with the strategic framework and is tailored towards the acquisition and development of skills, particularly for caseworkers and their supervisors; review all kinship care and current processes; develop a Strategic Framework for implementation over the next three years; Implement this Strategic Framework through a change management process that will address the current reactive culture;  identify the culture of all children and young people and appropriately support; and, Care and Protection Services needs to determine whether the primary record keeping function will be a paper file or an electronic system.

Opposition spokesperson for community services, Vicki Dunne said the most recent Public Advocate report only highlights the Government’s decision to give one of their “most incompetent Ministers responsibility of the most vulnerable members of our community”.

Mrs Dunne drew attention to the Public Advocate report’s findings including, front line staff within the Care and Protection Service were “battling against systems that failed to support them”, lack of proper recording of the details around decision making, 25 per cent of cases didn’t include information about patterns of abuse or neglect and 35 per cent of cases, the emergency carer was not or only partially given information about the young person’s needs.

“These vulnerable children rely on her abilities, and she has let them down,” Mrs Dunne said.