Who could have seen it coming?

A family’s secret taping of a meeting with a CYF manager may seriously undermine public confidence in the agency. And maybe it should. Undermined confidence, tinged with revulsion, would be entirely the right response of an informed public, judging from the reported contents of the recording now in the hands of Radio New Zealand.

The problem is not only on the appalling errors to which CYF admits, but also the trenchant capacity for denial still evident in other parts of its self-assessment.

The extended family of a bashed-todeath Southland toddler made the recording during a meeting with a CYF manager in which they were told that no-one could have predicted the wee boy’s death.

But here was a child who died five days after he was discharged from hospital, having suffered a broken leg, broken tooth, crushed hand and other injuries.

Social workers, the manager said, hadn’t been sure they needed to be concerned about the cause of those injuries. That’s incomprehensible. And of course there was concern. It had been written into the family file that the home was ‘‘unsafe’’ for the boy and his 3-year-old sister.

Not that this was the conclusion in the tragically misleading report put to a judge who had wanted an assessment when the mother’s boyfriend, who had been on electronic bail facing multiple violence charges, sought to be allowed back into the home.

The upshot was that the child was returning to what, RNZ reports, was a P-using household, supposedly rendered okay by a ‘‘safety plan’’ cobbled together without involving wider family and with insufficient attention to warnings about the boyfriend.

This plan relied on scrupulous conduct by the mother and her boyfriend, neither of whom stuck to it.

She left him alone with the child who was then found dead. He was charged but died in custody in a suspected suicide.

CYF admitted multiple errors but maintained to the family that it had fulfilled its statutory obligations.

So either our lawmakers have concocted legislation disgracefully unfit for purpose, or we still have an agency which, after all this time and a giddying number of reviews, remains malfunctioning and underresourced and undertrained for the tasks required of it.

CYF is again under restructure, coming under the new Ministry for Vulnerable Children, which will be set up amid assurances of greater coherence, functional competence and a superior complaints process - one that simply must be sufficiently independent to gag on internal reports such as this latest disgraceful example.