Department admits it's in the dark on foster homes

Department admits it's in the dark on foster homes

THE NSW Department of Community Services regularly places children in homes it has never seen, with foster parents its own army of welfare workers has never met.

The department admitted yesterday that it depended on the staff of the 39 private companies and non-government agencies that supplied foster care services to provide updates on the standard of care they offered.

The business of providing foster care is worth more than $600million a year in NSW alone. Some agencies, such as Life Without Barriers, which was established by lawyers and businessmen in the Hunter Valley in the late 1990s, last year received tens of millions of dollars in funding from DOCS.