Submission to the Portfolio Committee on Social Development on the Annual Report for 2006-7 of the Department of Social Development

OVERVIEW OF ISSUES AFFECTING ALL SERVICES

The GWSSDF once again thanks the Portfolio Committee for the opportunity to comment on the Department’s Annual Report. Clusters of organisations associated with our Forum who deliver specific types of service will be informing you about delivery by both the Department and NPOs with regard to specific types of service covered in the report. This overview deals with three cross-cutting issues that impact on all services, namely human resources, financing, and research and information management.

1. HUMAN RESOURCES

When reporting on its delivery on all aspects of its mandate, the Department includes the achievements of registered NPOs, both subsidised and unsubsidised. We believe this is correct, at least where subsidised services are concerned, as government and NPO services to the people of Gauteng are inextricably linked. We also welcome this as recognition of the fact that the responsibility for delivery on the human rights of our people which are addressed by our sector ultimately rests with government. In most of the objectives where the activities of civil society are reflected as also being those of government, this is an accurate reflection which we are happy to support.  In the case of human resourcing, however, something different is happening.

We note from its response to questions from the Portfolio Committee that the Department has filled 2 216 posts. What is not clear from the report is that the Department’s success in this regard has been at the expense of the NPOs and thus of the people served by them. The Department has been conducting an aggressive recruitment drive, implemented at regular intervals, targeting NPO personnel for the filling of its own vacancies. This has no doubt enabled the Department to carry out its own direct services more effectively; however it has left gaps all over the broader service network in the process, thus impacting heavily on delivery in all aspects of Programme 2: Social Welfare Services. To complicate matters further, the Department of Social Development in North West has also recently been very successfully recruiting staff from our organisations.

The gaps left in NPO services by these recruitment activities in many cases involve very poor and marginalised communities, in townships, rural areas and informal settlements. The losses are devastating the sector and have rendered some services non-functional. The impact on service delivery is appalling. Caseloads remain vacant for months and people in urgent need go unattended; those who do receive attention find themselves served by an endless procession of new recruits who are still learning the ropes. The GWSSDF is in the process of conducting research on turnover and will make this available to the Committee as soon as it is complete.

There are a number of very worrying features of the situation apart from the loss of personnel. It is not unusual for staff to walk out of NPO jobs giving 24 hours’ notice, which amounts to highly unethical conduct towards clients as well as being likely to be in breach of their contracts with their employers. Why would the Department want to take on people who behave like this? Unfortunately, as such practices become more widespread the impression is created among young practitioners that such conduct is acceptable. In addition, we are informed that people are being hired after merely filling in a form, without even being interviewed - a practice which we believe to be highly questionable.

Our sector, comprising government and civil society in partnership, cannot succeed unless we have a stable workforce in which practitioners grow on the job and become skilled and effective in the very difficult and challenging work with which they are charged. Developing social service personnel is not a matter of putting pegs into holes; it involves the assimilation of knowledge and skills in the context of a personal growth process. It takes at least a year on the job to achieve a basic level of competence in any field. What we are doing at present is dangerous for the future of our sector, in that there is a growing culture of job-hopping in pursuit of the highest bidder. People are entering jobs and leaving them again, sometimes within weeks and even days, with no regard for the people that depend on them for a service, and no sense of vocation or commitment. The organisations that employ such people then have to continue spending large sums of money and endless hours in recruitment and orientation processes, only to again lose those who arrive shortly afterwards. What is particularly worrying is that people who are moving on while not yet grounded in what they are doing will become the supervisors and mentors of newer arrivals, with very negative consequences for the quality of services as time goes by. This pattern, if it continues, will eat away at the fabric of our sector and will benefit no-one, least of all the vulnerable people who need our services.

It is a matter of the utmost importance for our sector that we together stabilise, develop and expand our workforce. We recommend the following solutions:

• We must see ourselves as one system and plan accordingly.
  The national Department’s Recruitment and Retention Strategy must be expanded to include all categories of social service personnel, including those employed by NPOs. The terms on which state bursaries are offered must allow candidates to take up employment in subsidised NPOs as well as the Department. Campaigns to attract staff must be directed to the whole sector, given that delivery on the Department’s objectives requires that the entire sector be functioning effectively.
• We must agree on standardised salary scales for the Department and its NPO partners
  The principle of equal pay for equal work must apply to all of those services for which government is ultimately responsible and that are being delegated to its partners. We appreciate the special effort recently made by the Department in granting a 7.5% increase in social work post subsidies, to prevent the salary gap widening further after the civil service strike. This averted what would otherwise have been an intensification of the problem; however it did not get to the root of the matter. We urgently request the Committee to ask for a budget for 2008-9 which will be sufficient to accommodate such provision, and which will take into account social workers at different levels of experience and other categories of staff.
• Partners must consider each other when taking on new staff.
  Every employer must expect of new staff that they honour their obligations towards their previous employers and properly terminate their relationships with their clients before being appointed.
• We must cease to use our scarce supply of social workers as social security clerks.
  The process of placing hundreds of thousands of orphans and vulnerable children in court-ordered foster care is causing the collapse of what always has been an overstretched and fragile child protection system. The necessary legislative and policy changes must be introduced to provide access to social security for these families without depending on the courts, combined with community-based support programmes. The children and families in question would be far better served by such a system than by being on caseloads which are so overloaded that all that can be delivered is the Foster Care Grant. The grant is essential but does not inherently require social workers to ensure its delivery.

2. FINANCING

The issue of human resourcing is of course intertwined with that of financing. The consideration of financing models is one of the tasks that has been flagged for the post-Summit process. But in essence what our Forum calls for is a dispensation in which funding for all essential services is planned for in a systematic manner, so that the fate of each service is not in the balance from one year to the next. Core services must be covered so that attention can be given to improvement and development, and not forever be focussed on survival. Our members in general raise most of their funds from sources outside government, and we are not suggesting that they should cease to fundraise energetically. But there is a need for government and NPOs to look together at the limits to the available funding from other sources, and for the Social Development budget to be adequate to meet the costs of essential services at least to the extent that  these cannot be met from such sources. One of the issues at stake here is the right to equality. For example, every child in a children’s home is a ward of the state. Why should the ward who happens to be in a children’s home run by an NPO have to depend on a fraction of the resourcing that is made available for a child in a government facility? The NPO can bridge the gap to some extent. But core funding should be assured on the basis of the constitutional rights of all persons in need.

3. RESEARCH AND INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

The Forum has been very encouraged to note that a new information management system is being put in place by the Department and that this should greatly improve the quality of data available to the sector. At the same time we note that there is still an almost total absence of baseline data concerning the extent of need in each category of service, making it impossible to plan and budget effectively for services in the province. This is also creating great difficulty for the Social Audit process which is continuing as part of the post-Summit process. It is our belief that the Department is in need of substantially expanded research capacity. We regard the R2.45 million allocation for Research and Demography as reflected in the budget for Programme 3 (page 124 of the report) as being very inadequate. We recommend that this be substantially increased.

3. CONCLUSION

As the Committee is aware, last year’s Welfare Summit process placed the partnership between the Department and NPOs on a vastly improved footing. This is continuing in the post-Summit process through which it is intended that the Summit resolutions will be implemented. All the issues touched on in this submission are part of the agenda of that process.  But all require immediate attention. They are key to the resolution of the burning issues which the Department and NPOs together are confronting in our efforts to enable the poorest, most vulnerable and most marginalised members of our society to realise their human rights. We must address them to make our sector the really powerful instrument that it can be in the human development of our province and country.

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