Foster care grants at risk

COURT DEADLINE LOOMS: DEPARTMENT FAILS TO COME UP WITH LEGAL SOLUTION AGAIN

These grants need to be extended via court order every two years but there’s a huge backlog of cases.

Social workers across the country are scrambling to clear a huge backlog of foster care grant cases as a court deadline, less than a month away, looms.

“Social workers are so focused on [foster care] court cases that they are unable to deal with other work like gender-based violence and substance abuse cases,” said Hendrina Samson, head of the department of social development in the Northern Cape.

Samson, along with several other provincial heads, told parliament’s portfolio committee on social development last week that they would not be able to meet the November deadline.

All the provincial heads, except those for the Western Cape and Gauteng, gave brief progress reports on challenges to resolve a countrywide backlog of foster care orders awaiting court extensions.

According to section 159 of the Children’s Act, foster care grants expire after two years unless extended by order of a children’s court. Lapsed court orders have been costing tens of thousands of orphaned children their grants since 2010.

The High Court in Pretoria has made the current outstanding foster care orders valid until November 28 to allow payments to continue until then. In the meantime, social workers are still applying to the children’s court to have these and new orders extended beyond November 28.

The Centre for Child Law’s initial urgent application was in 2011 in the High Court in Pretoria against the minister of social development.

The court extended existing foster care grants for three years to give the department time to create a “comprehensive legal solution” to solve the crisis in the foster care system. But in 2014 when three years had passed, the centre and the department found themselves in court again and the department was given another three years grace.

Then in November 2017, the court granted an extension to the national and provincial departments of social development, as well as the SA Social Security Agency (Sassa), for 24 months to continue payment and management of over 200 000 foster care orders that were due to lapse. This deadline ends in five weeks, at the end of November.

In September, there were still 89 538 foster care court orders outstanding. At the time, Minister Lindiwe Zulu assured MPs that the department was working with the different provinces to ensure they met the deadline and avoided further legal action.

But after last week’s briefing, the minister’s assurances had already fallen through, with provincial heads reporting that there were still over 51 000 cases outstanding or unresolved.

As of the second week of October, the provincial breakdown of cases to be dealt with by the November 3o deadline were: Northern Cape 904; Mpumalanga 510; Limpopo 2 717; Free State 4 780; Eastern Cape 5 067; Gauteng 5 405; North West 7 013; Western Cape 8 250 and KZN 18 492. from