Cuts saw NSW caseworker spots left vacant

CHILD protection positions across NSW have been going unfilled as managers struggle to meet government budget cuts, a former bureaucrat has admitted.

A former deputy chief executive at the Department of Family and Community Services, Helen Freeland, told a parliamentary inquiry on Monday that she had been forced to implement a range of savings measures due to budgetary pressures.

While the department, formerly known as DoCS, never actually reduced caseworker numbers, she said people were employing cheaper staff and not filling vacancies in a bid to cut costs.

"There were some weeks where a position might be vacated by a caseworker before you can appoint someone permanently to that position, so in that time you make some savings," she said.

The inquiry, set up by the NSW opposition, is probing whether Minister Pru Goward has made misleading statements to parliament about caseworker numbers.

Ms Goward has been under siege since August budget estimates when she denied any knowledge of an Ernst & Young report, which contradicted her claims that NSW had more than 2060 caseworkers, when in fact only 1797 positions had been filled.

The opposition says June meeting minutes show Ms Goward was advised that millions of dollars would be required if the promised posts were to be delivered.

Ms Goward, however, has consistently maintained the positions had been funded, and it was up to the department to decide where they go.

But Ms Freeland revealed that some regional directors had concluded the only way to meet budget cuts was to stop filling positions.

"When they worked out what their salaries budget was, they calculated that there were positions that they couldn't fill from time to time," Ms Freeland told the inquiry.

She said she had written to the department's other executives flagging her concerns.

But she could not say whether Ms Goward had been alerted to the problem.

Earlier on Monday, the department's director-general Michael Coutts-Trotter told the inquiry that confusion over caseworker numbers was rife, as there had been at least six different ways of counting staff at various times.

However he conceded it was clear the department wasn't "effectively translating" funding for 2068 community services caseworkers into frontline teams.

When NSW Greens MP John Kaye asked what happened to the money that was allocated to fund caseworker positions in 2012/13, Mr Coutts-Trotter said it was spent elsewhere in the department.

To the ire of the NSW opposition, Ms Goward was not required to front the inquiry into ministerial propriety after Premier Barry O'Farrell said no lower house minister needed to attend.

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