INSUFFICIENT progress has been made to improve the children’s care system since the publication of the Independent Jersey Care Inquiry report, Senator Ian Gorst has said.
The States Member, who was Chief Minister when the report was released in 2017, attributed the shortcoming to ‘process and bureaucracy’, adding that the new government would need to focus on the issue.
His comments come after the publication of a string of stories in the past two weeks highlighting that as many as 1,000 children do not have access to a daily hot meal, that 3,500 children are estimated to be experiencing domestic abuse and that children’s services are dealing with more than 400 cases of neglect at any time.
Senator Gorst said that the government had ‘forgotten the basics’.
‘I cannot remember the figure but in some recent statistics, most [protection] orders were being made against children who were already in the care of the state,’ he said. ‘That shows to me, quite clearly, that we have not made sufficient progress on dealing with the day-to-day issues of children who are in the care of the state. We made some good progress on policy and legislation but the individual care that children are experiencing is not really where we need it to be and there is a lot of progress that still needs to be made.
‘There is the issue of children being kept in hotels because we did not have appropriate accommodation for them, there is the house that was set up by the charity [Silkworth Trust] that we then did not use, there is Thomas House which is in the same situation. The new government is going to have to have a renewed focus on the actual care of children who are in the care of the state because we seem to have forgotten the basics.’
At the end of 2018, the government launched a pledge to put children first with States Members and government organisations signing up to it.
However, the initiative has come under criticism, with one school governor recently returning a poster during a Scrutiny meeting, claiming that the government was not fulfilling its promise.
Asked whether he thought the pledge was being delivered upon, Senator Gorst said: ‘Is it right to say that we are going to put children first after the inquiry and all that it told us? Yes, it is. That does not mean to say that old people or people with disabilities are being put second. It simply means that we need to have a focus on getting the fundamentals right in how we care for children.’
He added: ‘We have been trying to create the ethos right through the organisation that this is a family, trying to create a family and home environment and take children away from their natural family to a safer environment and yet there is so much process and bureaucracy that we have not been able to do that.’
Meanwhile, Former Children’s Minister Sam Mézec said he had found it difficult to make progress when he was in the role and laid the blame with the Council of Ministers.
‘What I can say with absolute certainty is that the pledge to reduce income inequality was made disingenuously and that there are, frankly, politicians who have no interest in dealing with that. That is where I found the greatest resistance when I was minister and since leaving that role as well,’ he said.
‘Some of the most basic things we could have done to address income inequality, which children would benefit from, were stopped because there is complete opposition to it from a wide cross-section of the Council of Ministers, in particular.
‘That pledge being abandoned and lying in tatters has made it much more difficult to put children first. If you are not trying to make an equal society, then you cannot put children first.’
