Last updated at 2:31 AM on 11th November 2010
The organisation of social workers that is supposed to stand up for the most troubled children has instead brought chaos to the family courts, MPs said yesterday.
Its staff do not do their jobs, its managers are weak and it has failed to cope with the crisis that swept the state child protection system after the Baby P scandal, they added.
A report from the Public Accounts Committee watchdog said the £131 million-a-year Children and Family Court Advisory Service (Cafcas) is ‘not fit for purpose’ and that its incompetence harms the hundreds of thousands of children who need its help.
Aftermath: Cafcas failed to see how the Peter Connelly (Baby P) scandal would impact on child protection agencies
But committee chairman, former Labour minister Margaret Hodge, said: 'Cafcass was ill-prepared for the very large increase in care cases in 2009-10 which followed the Baby Peter tragedy and caused chaos in the family justice system.
'This lack of readiness was a direct result of the organisation's continued failure to get to grips with the fundamental weaknesses in its culture, management and performance.
'It is still dealing with a legacy of low morale, unacceptably high levels of sickness absence and under-performance by some staff.'
While the specific impact of the Baby Peter tragedy was 'hard to predict', the possibility of a sustained increase in cases 'was a scenario that Cafcass should have planned for'.
Critical: Margaret Hodge, former Children's Minister, said the quango was 'not fit for purpose'
Cafcass has also taken 'too long to secure essential changes, and much of the responsibility lies with top management'.
'It is shocking that Cafcass has not previously collected all the information it needs to manage its workload more effectively,' the committee said.
Low compliance by staff with important requirements was 'a persistent problem' which undermined the body's efforts to improve, the MPs added.
There was also a risk that the number of unallocated cases could return to the 'unacceptable levels seen in summer 2009'.
Cafcass was still not providing a timely service, eight out of 10 Cafcass areas failed Ofsted inspections, and the committee 'does not share the Department for Education's confidence that all will be well by 2011', Mrs Hodge said.
Cafcass took an average of 27 days to fully allocate a care case to a family court adviser, down from up to 40 days between September 2009 and June 2010, but 'still well above what it should be', the report found.
It added that data which Cafcass holds on cases centrally 'contains inaccuracies'.
And sickness absence was 'unacceptably high', with an average of 11.6 days per staff member in 2009-10 and 16.1 days for family court advisers, compared with the public sector average of 8.3 days in 2009.
Cafcass said it had taken 'robust action' to improve the service.
Chief executive Anthony Douglas said: 'We will take heed of the PAC findings, and we will continue to defend the interests of the 140,000 children who we work with each year, each of whose cases is unique and many of whose lives we improve as a direct result of our involvement.'
He went on: 'Cafcass is fit for purpose because we have absorbed a massive number of new cases in the last 12 months and have improved our productivity by 17 per cent, which is a performance any organisation would be proud of.
'We have improved on every measure considered by the PAC and the National Audit Office, including falling staff sickness, faster filing times of court reports and quicker allocation of cases.'
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1328434/Child-protection-body-fit-purpose.html#ixzz14xPejyfh
