Funding gaps and finding solutions: Bernard Gloster reflects on first year as Tusla CEO
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Bernard Gloster is ringing in his first year as CEO of the Child and Family Agency, but shrugs off any notions of a Zoom party or birthday cake.
"I think it has been, in the main, everything that I would have expected to it to be, both in the positive and the challenges," the Limerick native says.
His targets on taking on the role were anchored around raising the quality of service, improving staffing and morale, and boosting public confidence, via improvements to practice, culture and structure. Having served more than three decades as a public servant, half of which was in senior management roles, he says he is "well-seasoned" and that some progress has been made.
He thinks back to the recruitment process he underwent to secure the post.
"I made the point to Pat Rabbitte, who is chair of Tusla, that I was a little bit struck by the fact so many people said to me when I was going to Tusla 'why would you do that? Why would you draw that on yourself?'
🚨The Board of @tusla has announced the appointment of Bernard Gloster as new Chief Executive.
— Tusla - Child and Family Agency (@tusla) June 28, 2019
➡️Read more here: https://t.co/3XutwtceQt
"After one year I can confidently say if not here tomorrow or I was to move on I would have no hesitation in recommending the job to someone else."
Tusla is only in existence since January 2014 and its infancy has been pockmarked with difficulties and the occasional scandal. Finances have been a constant challenge, and many have argued it has never been adequately funded. With the next Budget looming, its CEO is candid about what he feels is required.
"The first thing when I came to Tusla and saw there was a deficit, my first responsibility as CEO and as a public servant is to justify and demonstrate that I am utilising to the best effect what I have," he says, adding that "if there is a deficit, my next responsibility is to secure the funding for that, rather than cut services".
"Can I just say that the majority of Tusla's deficit this year, some €20m+, the majority of that is not, in my view, a deficit. A deficit makes it sound like we just went ahead and willy-nilly spent it. The majority of it is unfunded service we were asked to take on."
As an example, he refers to the clear need to approve six-figure sums for a child "in the most extreme of circumstances", who may need a tailored placement.
"Some call it a deficit, I call it underfunded," he continues, before outlining exactly what he feels is required, as submitted in the Budget estimates process.
"And I make no apology for saying that. They are on the record in the documents. [That's] extra, to what I have coming [already] into 2021."
Cue pencils flying in all directions in the Department of Finance.
"Now that sounds like a shocking amount of money to anybody but, again, I have a responsibility to set out what I believe are the needs and requirements of the agency to fulfill its function.
"Equally, I have to recognise as a public service organisation, like every other public service organisation, the public purse is limited, and, in the context of the Budget cycle we are about to go into, the collapse in GDP and all of the other factors, I have to be prudent within that.
"It's not the case that I have asked for 'this' and if I get 'that' there is going to be some sort of big stand-off. We will work with the department and with government to secure the best possible opportunity for Tusla, but that's the order of the cost that I have estimated would be required going into the coming year and not all of that will be new development - some of that will be just maintaining existing levels of service."
What he would like is for Tusla to get to a stage where, having plunged money into the type of infrastructure it needs, what is left is "normal demand". Those demands have been rising, not least in terms of annual referrals made to it, which have risen year-on-year.
"I want to be equally fair to the public," Mr Gloster says.
"If we don't get all of that [funding], it doesn't mean the whole thing is going to fall apart and services won't be good.
"But I am very clear that is the estimation territory you are talking about if you want to have a serious conversation about change."
That rise in annual referrals has been driven, to a large extent, by both the requirements of mandatory reporting, which came into effect in December 2017, and a growth in the number of retrospective abuse allegations. Ireland is still haunted by its past and the challenges are immense, not least the position Tusla finds itself in, charged with ensuring children today are protected, supporting and assisting survivors, while also needing to be forever cognisant of the rights and procedures involving someone against whom an allegation is made.
Into this milieu, Tusla's planned Child Abuse Substantiation Procedure (CASP) arrived - seen by many support organisations as CASP, the unfriendly ghost. It was claimed CASP would open the way for alleged abusers - notified as per requirements of an allegation made against them - to cross-examine the person making the allegation. Then it emerged that the implementation of CASP would be postponed until next March and it's clear that Mr Gloster believes there is a "legislative deficit" which has put Tusla in this tremendously awkward position. He wants a clear path to navigate a way out of it.
"I am unequivocal: our first responsibility, our primary statutory responsibility is to safeguard children and so we are much more focussed on them and interested in safeguarding children today and safeguarding their future, than we are about proving or not any incident that did or did not occur in the past," he says.
"It's not our function."
Except, at times, it is.
"Where it becomes our function is where it is necessary to investigate in order to protect children today.
"So if you have a person who is alleged to have done something, and whether that comes as a case of contemporary abuse or a case of retrospective abuse, they have certain rights which are there by virtue of the constitution and court judgments and rightly so.
"But if we need to investigate that for the purpose of potentially sharing that information with other people, because that person might have a lot of access to children - so they could be working with children, they could be involved in children's groups or sports clubs or other activities - that is a current-day risk we have to assess.
It goes back to Section 3 of the Childcare Act 1991, which begins: "It shall be a function of every health board to promote the welfare of children in its area who are not receiving adequate care and protection."
According to Mr Gloster: "You translate that into becoming an investigator - we have no power of compellability. We have different thresholds than the criminal system so we have the civil threshold of balance of probability, and at every time that we do that - and sometimes that can be really helpful to people on their journey of therapy - but at every point our first priority has to be to think about children and the safety of children today, and at every point in that process we can always be challenging, and people have a right to seek the relief of the courts, and we have to respond to what the courts tell us in their judgments. There is a legislative deficit there."
He outlines the agency's perspective in measured, calm but blunt terms.
"I would much rather that the investigation and substantiation function was not a function of Tusla. We are left with that legislative lacuna around that and that is the way it is for now," he says.
It's clear he hopes any upcoming report from the government-appointed Special Rapporteur on Child Protection, Dr Conor O'Mahony, may find a way out of this "challenging" space, and that government will legislate to do so. Some support organisations have queried whether CASP is already in place, at least in part, but Gloster rejects any idea of "CASP by the back door" and accepts that consistency in implementing existing codes is essential. But the commentary around the perceived right to cross-examine upset him.
"I listened with significant interest but I also listened with, I have to say, on a human level, some sadness at the representation of the right of cross-examination.
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"Understandably that created, perhaps, in the public narrative [an idea] that people making disclosures about their childhood were going to be frogmarched into a room and going to be set up at a desk, and a chair behind the desk, and the person they have accused of doing wrong to them in their childhood was going to harangue them and harass them with questions and Tusla was somehow going to just sit there and preside over that... Anybody who reads the procedure and the practice guidance can see clearly that is not what Tusla envisages, it's not Tusla's intention," Mr Gloster says.
"If you look at the practice guidance, for example, it tells social workers that if a person who is accused of something asserts their right to examine and to cross-examine the material, well, the social workers investigating the case should consider the following options: ask the accused person to write out their questions and take those questions, then discuss them with the complainant; or ask the accused person's solicitor to write out those questions and take them and discuss them.
"And if, ultimately, the person asserts their right, if you like, to confront the complainant, where immediately the first consideration is 'that's not suitable for children' and it's not suitable for vulnerable adults, and so we would have to consider whether we would allow or enable or facilitate that to occur. So it's not as simple as that very stark picture that emerged when the word cross-examination was put out there.
"But again, when I have all that said and done, my disposition is to focus on protecting children today and where there are adults who are vulnerable and who are discussing their life and their childhood to make sure they have supports and are facilitated."
He sums it up as "rights and needs" and the requirement "to be legal and appropriate in the right space".
It's simply the latest challenge for the agency. Moving on from past struggles, as CEO, Mr Gloster has tried to change the mindset within the organisation - saying it had become "a very defensive, inward-looking" body - and also in improving the perception of it among the public.
"The difference between Tusla and the health service; well, Tusla intervenes in people's lives when they might not welcome it or want it, whereas other public services are generally something people look for," he says.
But he feels he, and Tusla, are getting there.
He talks about better communication within and outside of Tusla, "performance managing a system rather than people", and a drive towards quicker and better solutions to problems. Regarding the vast quantity of data collated by the agency, he says: "Until you turn that data into information, that becomes knowledge, that informs your decisions, it's really just data."
Arguably, Tusla emerged from the Covid lockdown with its reputation enhanced, appearing sure-footed and proactive at a time of great uncertainty. Mr Gloster pays tribute to his staff, to those who volunteered for redeployment, who "took risks" to ensure children didn't lose out.
The pandemic has presented its own problems - hindering plans for enhanced cross-border recruitment, delaying a new performance conference model aimed at improving consistency of approach in the different regions - but Tusla's role as a critical frontline service has received a boost.
And while it shouldn't always be about what could be improved, as he explains in the context of a proactive audit of referrals which may or may not have been passed on to gardaí, as referred to elsewhere in these pages, "the best people to tell people about Tusla's problems are Tusla."
Interview over, and it's time for a photograph. He mentions with a laugh that this newspaper has tended to use a decade-old file picture of him in recent times, so that when anyone meets him they tell him he's getting old. Well, we're all getting on, perhaps more so over the past six months.
But Tusla? It's seven on its next birthday, learning to cycle around without stabilisers. Maybe the odd bump and fall is to be expected. Maybe they need the odd push in the right direction.