Page 4156 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 21 September 2011
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Let me turn briefly and, again for the benefit of the minister, succinctly to other issues related to this organisation. There are a number of service providers who employ a practice of supervised work for new employees who are going through induction and approval processes, and it is called in the industry “shadow shifts”. The directorate has told the organisation that we are all talking about, and the one that brought all of these bad practices to light, that shadow shifts are not a good practice. Yet when I asked directorate officials if there was a stated policy on this matter I was told that there was not. So the government is telling an agency service provider that it should not do something—when there is no policy to underpin or support that instruction.
Furthermore, the working with vulnerable people bill, which has been languishing for some time and which, if it had been passed, may have solved some of the problems that this organisation has been facing, is currently before the Assembly and actually contemplates the validity of shadow shifts and proposes to legislate for them. Presumably the directorate had a hand in developing that bill, so the obvious question arises: if there is a policy position for the purposes of the working with vulnerable people bill, why would the directorate tell an agency that such a practice should not be encouraged? I am unable to resolve this conundrum and perhaps the minister will be able to do so when she responds. But for the service provider there is a serious case of mixed messages from the directorate and there has been a serious case of mixed messages from this directorate to this service provider from the outset.
On the back of policy failures within the directorate and on the back of clear breaches of the law by the directorate we have a directorate reviewing the policies and procedures of the organisation in question. There were two visits that the directorate made which showed that they were reasonably satisfied with the operation of the organisation, although by their own admission the directorate told the organisation that there was no formal policy and procedure for approving an organisation to provide the services that it provided. That notwithstanding, after these two visits and after some modifications to practices, the government started to contract the organisation to provide services on a fee-for-service basis, which rather indicated to the organisation that it had got the tick. To any common man that would indicate that you had got the tick.
But all through this we saw a surprising ignorance on the part of the directorate about how policies should work in this area. I hope that Minister Burch can answer some of the questions about this. We do know, for instance, and this is a very important question that Ms Burch needs to answer, that as a result of her answers in question time yesterday it seems that Minister Burch knew about residential care placements with an inappropriate provider in July this year. And what did she do about it? I quote from yesterday’s question time:
I continued to ask for assurances from that point that these placements met our standards.
I do not know what that means. So for more than six weeks Minister Burch has “continued to ask for assurances”. Did she get them? We do not know. Clearly she did not get them before 8 September when I asked the directorate why they were making
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