Cafcass blasted over agency costs

By Ross Watson Tuesday, 26 January 2010

A family court union has criticised Cafcass for spending £3.8m on "inexperienced" agency staff.

Family court.

The Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (Cafcass) has been criticised by a family court union for spending £3.8m on agency staff in the space of just over six months last year.

The figure was revealed in a letter from Cafcass chief executive Anthony Douglas in reply to a series of Parliamentary questions from shadow children's minister Tim Loughton. According to Douglas, more than £1m was spent in each of Cafcass' three operational areas across England between April and October 2009.

The professional body for family court workers Napo has blasted Cafcass' use of what it describes as "inexperienced" agency staff.

According to Napo, they are often used at the expense of more experienced and less costly self-employed guardians.

"Taking on agency staff is unsatisfactory," said Harry Fletcher, Napo's assistant general secretary. "They are not on the books and are therefore not accountable. They can also leave at very short notice, which is destabilising for the service."

He added that Cafcass should be trying to increase numbers of permanent staff or making more use of selfemployed guardians as it attempts to clear a backlog of care applications.

Since the Baby Peter case, a surge in care applications has seen Cafcass staff struggle to keep up with workloads. Ofsted has also rated a number of Cafcass services as inadequate in the past year, while staff have complained of undue pressure to meet targets.

Last autumn, the Department for Children, Schools and Families made an extra £1.6m available to help Cafcass clear its backlog. Figures revealed earlier this month showed the number of unallocated care cases dropped from 986 at the end of August 2009 to 497 as of 11 January 2010.

A Cafcass spokesman said: "We remain fully committed to the mixed economy of mostly employed staff, enhanced by the various types of flexible workforce, which includes agency staff and self-employed guardians. It is a generalisation to state that agency staff are inexperienced. We apply the same quality assurance principles to agency staff work as we do to employed staff."

He added that Cafcass has been forced to spend some of the additional government funding on agency staff in London, because self-employed staff were unable or unwilling to do the work required.