Judith Collins MP
National Party Welfare Spokeswoman

14 March 2006

Can Dyson be trusted with CYF?

National Party Welfare spokeswoman Judith Collins says Ruth Dyson is still in denial over her management of CYF.

Asked in Parliament today, Ms Dyson said it was not her view that CYF was failing, nor did she accept any responsibility for a situation that has got so serious that the Labour Government has no choice but to merge CYF into a large bureaucracy.

“In the past week, Labour has painted CYF as a dysfunctional department that can no longer deliver adequate care and protection to our vulnerable children and families.

“If it’s not broken, as Ms Dyson claims, why is it being fixed?

“The truth is that she has presided over large funding increases and failed to ensure taxpayer money was being well spent.

“Even today in Parliament Ms Dyson would not say how many CYF staff will be eligible for redundancy, or how much this merger will cost, either in social or economic terms.”

As recently as June the Minister was claiming that CYF was ‘moving into a phase of what I describe as performance excellence, and that is not a term I would use lightly’. She also said that ‘productivity, the timeliness, and the service quality improvements are quite extraordinary’.

“This Minister is now running a mile from the department that she was in charge of. The staff of CYF, as well as the children and the families they deal with, deserve much better than that,” says Ms Collins.

ENDS

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