Translation analysis by Dutch journalist Kim van Keken in the Dutch weekly magazine Vrij Nederland Monday, 13 February 2023
As the problems in youth care grow, the House of Representatives gets lost in a palace of mirrors of action plans. Meanwhile, help for youth has been flattened into a financial issue. ‘Young people I knew are no longer with us because help came too late.’
Whenever the House of Representatives debates youth welfare, there is an air of gloom in the Chamber each time. This has been the case for years. Even the ever-optimistic SGP leader Kees van der Staaij then makes bitter speeches. How is it possible, he wondered aloud in November 2021, that he hears from young people who are having a hard time that there is very little attention to their problems, while the cabinet tells other, optimistic, stories?
All these stories make one dizzy. There are action lines, programmes, proposals, future scenarios, project teams, handbooks, living labs and quartermasters. There is talk, lots of talk, and much more being written. Slowly, the Chamber gets lost in a hall of mirrors of plans, while the number of problems in youth care only increases. ‘Young people I have known are no longer there because help came too late,’ said Green Left MP Lisa Westerveld.
The Chamber itself has been receiving cries of distress and fireletters for years. From parents, young people, social workers, judges and even inspectorates. ‘It is unacceptable,’ reads a letter from youth welfare stakeholders, ‘that a child has to wait in a police station for appropriate help.’ A third of the children placed in care by judges are on a waiting list. Those same judges warn that help for children placed out of care and their parents takes too long. So long that children become attached to their foster family and eventually cannot return home.
BITTERLY LITTLE CHANGED
‘It is the government’s job to protect children,’ said Council for the Judiciary chairman Henk Naves. He therefore urged the relevant ministers Franc Weerwind (D66, minister for legal protection) and Maarten van Ooijen (state secretary for health, welfare and sport on behalf of the Christian Union) to make ‘immediate provisions’. ‘To govern is to look ahead. And it is also doing that which is needed now. Because children and families need help now,’ the letter from youth protection officers read. That was last spring – and still precious little has changed.
What youth care is has never been defined, which means it covers everything from out-of-home placements to help with exam stress.
Indeed, the Healthcare and Youth Inspectorate and the Justice and Security Inspectorate stated unequivocally last September that “the government is failing in its duty to protect vulnerable children”. In the same month, researchers from Leiden University concluded that the youth protection system is rattling. ‘This raises questions about the legitimacy of government intervention in family life, especially where this leads to an out-of-home placement.’ According to the researchers, such intervention in family life ‘can only be legitimised in the light of human rights if the goal of this intrusion, protecting the child’s development, can actually be achieved’. And so that is very much in question, as too often help is simply not there.
EMERGENCIES
For now, the cries for help and investigations end up on top of a pile of other fireletters. What is needed now is not being done, despite many pleas from social workers and youth protection workers.
The government itself does acknowledge that the problems are big. ‘Youth care, the system, is broken,’ state secretary Van Ooijen said in the Volkskrant last May. But he did not get much further than naming the problems.
Since municipalities became responsible for providing help to young people themselves in 2015, the use of youth care has exploded. ‘Whereas at the beginning of this century, 1 in 27 young people received youth aid, now it is 1 in 7.5,’ Van Ooijen recently reported in a cabinet letter. Especially in recent years, the demand for help increased. This is also due to a missing definition of what youth care actually is. It has never been defined, which means that everything falls under youth care, from out-of-home placements to help with exam stress.
Because the latter kind of ‘lighter help’ is easy to provide and financially more profitable, all kinds of market players focus on it. It is the children with more complicated problems, such as anorexia or a dysfunctional family, who end up on waiting lists. And those lists keep growing. While the number of providers of complex care decreases, because there is no dry bread to be earned. Moreover, you run the risk of care taking too long, which means you have to give up as an entrepreneur.
So something has to change. The municipalities, which are now responsible for youth care, agree on this. The parties also know what they want to change. It is only on money that the municipalities and the government cannot agree.
HAGGLING
Since 2021, at the time of the Rutte III government, there has been talk of the ‘youth reform agenda’. Van Ooijen, the minister who took over that reform agenda in Rutte IV, promised in November 2022 to come up with white smoke before Christmas. That didn’t work out. The entire opposition wanted a debate on that in early January, but the coalition stopped it.
‘Irresponsible,’ Labour Party MP Mohammed Mohandis called that blockade. ‘We know that the problems are numerous,’ complemented Renske Leijten (SP), ‘but as long as it is stuck with the financial agreements between the central government and the municipalities, nothing will get off the ground. The youth really cannot wait another year; they have already waited too long. The youth have been fooled for too long.’
The bickering contrasts sharply with the energetic way in which the Rutte II government (2012-2017) completely overhauled youth care. Back then, the central government and municipalities quickly agreed.
All parties unanimously agreed in 2010 that youth care, which was then channelled through the provinces, was far too fragmented.
In the years before – just like now – there were waiting lists and bureaucratic mazes in which young people, parents and social workers were wandering. Back then, too, institutes wrote reports with titles like (Un)responsible Waiting for Youth Care (by the Economic Board) and Waiting for Your Future (by the National Ombudsman).
A parliamentary working group Future Exploration of Youth Care was set up and all parties unanimously agreed in 2010 that youth care, which at the time still ran through the provinces with all kinds of financial pots and administrative layers in between, was far too fragmented. All parties unanimously felt that municipalities could provide help to young people from now on, mainly because they were closer to the child. But because Balkenende IV, and then Rutte I, fell prematurely, the plans were never properly developed.
ROLLING DOWN THE STREET
Until the Rutte II government (VVD, PvdA) took office and, with steam and boiling water, introduced sweeping reforms, including the decentralisation of youth care. Only, this huge system change was introduced too quickly in 2015. Municipalities were unprepared and stared blindly at a directorial role, while central government already booked an annual cut of 15 per cent (450 million euros). ‘Both parties were too eager and too hasty,’ judged an arbitration tribunal in 2021, when the Association of Dutch Municipalities and the state were behaving in a wholly unacceptable manner because of the growing costs and problems.
Youth care costs had exploded from €3.6 billion in 2015 to €5.5 billion in 2019, according to a report. And they keep rising. Only no one wants to bear them.
The arbitration commission argued that the central government should compensate the municipalities for billions, at least until 2028. The committee also advised the municipalities and the government to “get to work energetically on a development agenda”. This was due on 1 January 2022, but is still not in place, more than a year after the deadline.
However, the new Rutte IV government has already booked a cut of 374 million euros, starting in 2023. Thus, youth care has now been reduced to a financial noose that no one wants. While governments openly bicker and pass the ball to each other, vulnerable children are insufficiently protected. The quite clear warnings from professionals (‘do something in the meantime’) simply do not come out nicely in the polder consultation.
ALARM BELL
Exactly how it went when the decentralisations were introduced in 2015. Experts wrote letters and were allowed to voice their concerns in the Chamber, only no one really listened. ‘Painfully, the flaws that have come to light in recent years were all predicted in advance,’ Ido Weijers, emeritus professor of juvenile justice at Utrecht University, wrote in 2019 in Justitiële explorations of the Scientific Research and Documentation Centre of the Ministry of Justice and Security.
The Dutch House of Representatives approved the new system fairly smoothly at the end of 2013. Only SP, PVV, 50Plus and Party for the Animals voted against, because of the cuts and fears that municipalities were not ready for such a large package of tasks. After all, home care for the elderly, for instance, also became a municipal task from now on. A majority in the First Chamber voted in favour, but wanted to hear 20 experts first. Remarkably, the vast majority of them sounded the alarm.
No one was against change, but professionals were very suspicious of the motives behind it and the way in which all help for youth was being shaken up.
‘Irresponsible,’ former Children’s Ombudsman Marc Dullaert called the ‘transition agenda, the transformation agenda and the remediation agenda tied together like a Gordian knot’. Rutger Jan van der Gaag, president of doctors’ federation KNMG at the time, expressed ‘great concern about the lightness and haste that is being made in implementing this law.’
No one was against change, but professionals were highly suspicious of the motives behind it and the way in which all help for young people was being shaken up. Or as former director Martin Sitalsing of Bureau Jeugdzorg Groningen put it: ‘closer to the network, own strength and cheaper. It’s almost like: who is against peace? Unfortunately, it is being flattened into a financial and institutional issue.’
VAGUE CONTRACTS
One expert found his fellow experts in the First Chamber too gloomy. Hugo de Jonge was his name, and the ambitious CDA alderman in Rotterdam urged speed. ‘Stick to 1 January 2015. That is crucial, because you see a huge drive among municipalities.’ And: ‘Surely we should realise how much of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity this is because we are really going to put the hugely complex field of youth care on a new footing.’
A special committee headed by former alderman Leonard Geluk, which closely monitored the changes at the behest of the government, was far from reassured. Geluk, ten months before the big transition, spoke of alarm phase red. He warned of vague contracts, institutions going bankrupt and municipalities unable to cope. Then state secretary Martin van Rijn (PvdA) called it important that all administrative and financial preconditions were met.
Shortly afterwards, he and state secretary Fred Teeven (VVD) prematurely dissolved the committee that critically assessed these preconditions. The ministers wanted to prevent too many committees overseeing municipalities’ care tasks.
‘Let there be no misunderstanding,’ Geluk said in NRC. ‘As a committee, we would have loved to have seen the year 2015. I don’t want to put it in too dramatic terms, but there is a risk that the whole ambition of the Youth Act – to better regulate care for the most vulnerable families – will be pushed back. That we won’t achieve it for once until 2020.’
TOO ROSY
Even that year proved too rosy. In 2018, the law was evaluated and the conclusions were scathing. To begin with, the researchers argued that research into practice was virtually impossible. ‘After all, there are certainly as many parties as there are municipalities. There is also a lack of the necessary objective registration data.’
Research institute Nivel and the Social and Cultural Planning Office did conduct a survey of nine hundred parents and it showed that one in three parents had difficulty finding help for their child – especially vulnerable families got lost in bureaucracy.
Vrij Nederland tried to make chocolate out of the action plans, but soon got lost – as did MPs – in the mirror palace of plans.
Meanwhile, alderman De Jonge had become minister and was responsible for youth care. In response to the evaluation, he launched the Care for Youth action programme, a thick tome full of milestones and fine promises such as ‘giving children the chance to develop optimally’ or ‘investing in professionals’ professionalism’. Clear, measurable goals were not there. Or as consulting firm Andersson Elffers Felix wrote in the advisory report And then you are grown up in the small print: ‘If the goal is to provide more and better help, this will be accompanied by additional costs.’ And a little further on: ‘Given the current shortfalls in youth aid, this is a vulnerability in the action programme for the time being.’
BOGGED DOWN IN COLLECTING
De Jonges action programme did not get much attention. Nor was there time for that, as the House of Representatives was buried under the action programmes for young, old, sick and (less) sporty Netherlands of the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport. In a short time, no fewer than 21 were launched with titles such as At Home in the Nursing Home, Violence Belongs Nowhere or The Best Fit Care for Vulnerable Youth, not to be confused with Care for Youth. Eighteen programmes were analysed by special rapporteurs from the House of Representatives in May 2019. The conclusion: the vast majority of action programmes lack measurable goals and a financial section.
‘We actually get a bit bogged down in collecting information,’ said MP Judith Tielen (VVD) who analysed Care for Youth as rapporteur. ‘We are beating a path, while we have actually agreed nothing together with the minister about what we consider important and what we are going to look at.’
Fleur Agema (PVV), who has been speaking about youth care in the House of Representatives since 2006, concluded: ‘If you get to do this debate for a number of years in a row, you actually see that there are always a lot of goals being set, that there is a lot of enthusiasm about it, but that actually quite little comes of it.’ Her remark was rewarded a few weeks later with the announcement of yet another action plan.
Vrij Nederland tried to make chocolate of the action plans, but soon got lost – as did the MPs – in the hall of mirrors of plans. ‘What is striking,’ the rapporteurs wrote in 2019 for good reason, ‘is that for the concrete interpretation or elaboration of parts of an action programme, reference is often made to future reports.’ And then nothing more can be found in those. Or reference is made to another plan. For example, a Care for Youth progress report refers to 13 other programmes.
In June 2021, Care For Youth stopped. The implementers themselves wrote: ‘To what extent the enormous effort within this programme has led to improvements within the youth support system is difficult to prove. In a complex environment with limited numerical data, it is not possible to establish causal links between efforts and outcomes.’
This article is a translation of the work of Dutch investigative journalist, Kim van Keken
