Social Workers Registration Amendment Bill

on behalf of the Minister for Social Development and Employment: I present a legislative statement on the Social Workers Registration Amendment Bill.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

Hon SIMON WATTS: I move, That the Social Security Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

Social workers provide essential support to some of the most vulnerable populations across New Zealand, including children and marginalised communities. They support their communities to ensure people receive the assistance that they need to live safe and fulfilling lives. This Government wants to empower and support this critical workforce to meet the diverse and evolving needs of our communities. The bill seeks to amend the Social Workers Registration Act 2003 to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of operations carried out under the Act. It highlights our Government’s commitment to enhancing the social work profession and is a way to ensure that social workers are supported and regulated to serve our communities, importantly safely and effectively.

The Act protects the public by ensuring that social workers are registered, competent, accountable, and follow professional standards. This ensures social workers have the necessary level of professionalism to deliver appropriate care and service to their communities and is an important part in keeping our most vulnerable people and children safe. The Act establishes the Social Workers Registration Board as a regulatory authority for overseeing social worker registration. The Act also mandates the board to conduct a review of both its operations and the operation of the Act at least every five years. This bill responds to the board’s 2020 review of the Act. The 16 minor policy changes and technical amendments will strengthen the efficiency and effectiveness of operations under the Act, as well as address inconsistencies that have crept in over time. The first reading and select committee process showed a good level of support for these proposals.

I’d like to use this opportunity to remind the House of the six key policy amendments in this bill and the rationale behind them. Firstly, one amendment seeks to broaden interim suspension grounds, allowing action when a formal investigation is considered but not yet started. This change prioritises public safety by addressing concerns about a social worker’s professionalism or practice, while ensuring suspensions meet specific criteria to maintain fairness.

Another amendment would allow for the extension of interim suppressions to allow sufficient time for an investigation to be completed. Currently, suspended social workers receive notices every 10 days, even if there is no change to their status. This amendment streamlines communications while ensuring the correct process continues.

The bill also seeks to enhance the board’s professional conduct committee’s flexibility by allowing it to combine available outcomes rather than it just being limited to one per case, ensuring it can handle complex cases effectively. To improve efficiency, another amendment would allow the board to delegate registration functions, freeing members to focus on governance responsibilities and reducing delays for applicants seeking registration.

The fifth proposed amendment would clarify the board’s role in monitoring prescribed qualifications. While already implied, this change makes it explicit in law, ensuring there is no ambiguity about the board’s responsibility.

Finally, the bill seeks to transfer the power to investigate individuals falsely claiming to be registered social workers, or practising without the authority, from the Ministry of Social Development to the board.

On behalf of the Government, I want to thank Social Services and Community Committee members for their review of the proposed amendments and commentary across the House. I note the committee raised that extending suspension notice periods may create uncertainty for suspended social workers. As mentioned before, this amendment is about reducing the administrative burden on the board as well as removing excessive communication when there has been no change in the status for suspended social workers. I want to reassure you across the House that the notice period this amendment updates is not tied to the investigation. When the board has sufficient information to believe that a social worker is safe to return to practice, they can lift an interim suppression, even when an investigation is ongoing.

I want to thank the five submitters who took the time to share their perspectives on this bill. Your input is invaluable and has been very helpful as part of developing this bill. It was encouraging to hear submitters express their support for key amendments in the bill, particularly those that aim to strengthen public safety provisions, update language to be gender-neutral, and create greater flexibility in tribunal membership.

I also want to address some of the concerns raised by submitters. One submitter raised concerns that the amendments might increase social workers’ fees and costs for tertiary providers. However, the board assures us that these minor technical changes won’t directly affect costs. Another concern was regarding the amendments to broaden interim suppression grounds so that a social worker could face an interim suspension if a police or other investigation is likely. The submitter highlighted that this could lead to arbitrary suspensions and suggested stronger evidence requirements to be introduced. The Act already strikes a careful balance between ensuring public safety and minimising unnecessary disruption to the workforce, and existing safeguards within the Act will continue to prevent arbitrary suspensions, even with the introduction of this amendment. The select committee carefully considered these concerns, along with the other points raised in submissions, and ultimately determined that changes to the proposed amendments were not necessary.

Officials have identified one technical adjustment to the bill. This change aims to ensure the smooth transfer of the investigative function from the Ministry of Social Development to the board. This change will prevent unnecessary disruption for those currently under investigation and enable the board to carry out the function effectively from the transfer date.

While workforce shortages are out of scope of this bill, they remain a significant concern and an important issue, echoed by our submitters during the select committee process. I am very aware of the challenges this presents not just for the workforce but, importantly, for the communities across our country in which they serve. That is why Minister Upston in this instance has made her expectations to the board very clear: that developing a robust strategy must be a priority. The strategy will focus on mitigating workforce shortages and ensuring we have a resilient and well-supported social worker workforce.

Although at face value this bill makes minor amendments to operations under the Act, the cumulative changes of these changes is important, and it is an important step in ensuring the Act remains fit for purpose. It demonstrates that this Government is committed and is a strong and sustainable supporter of our social worker workforce. Importantly, we are committed to ensure public safety. I commend this bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Kia ora, Madam Speaker. As I listened to the Minister of Revenue’s comments there, it is interesting just to consider the work of our social workers throughout New Zealand, and the important role that they play in every single part of society. Often, we consider social workers to be those who work for Oranga Tamariki, but, actually, it goes far further than that. As we consider the second reading as it’s come back from the Social Services and Community Committee, I think it’s really important for us to acknowledge the social workers throughout our society, in every part of our community. We think of in our schools and the work that many social workers to do support our young tamariki, our rangatahi.

We think of our hospitals and our healthcare centres, where social workers are so crucially involved. I had an example of that several years ago in Taranaki Base Hospital. My old neighbour was a little bit older and had been struggling with his health, and I’d tried to support him into a rest home. There was no way he was going to move, because he was stubborn and he liked his own home, and rightly so. Why would he want to move out of that? But several falls later, we were in A & E, and it wasn’t until the social worker at the hospital actually came down and sat with myself and Jim and talked through why he should consider this, and gave him options and didn’t direct him to do anything, but it came to the place where he actually made the right decision, I believe, because he needed better care. It was a social worker within our hospital system that supported myself and supported my friend through that, and I say thank you.

They’re also obviously with our young people in Oranga Tamariki, Open Home Foundation, and many other youth and child organisations. They’re in our rainbow community in terms of social workers who are working across our rainbow whānau, whether it be in RainbowYOUTH or OutLine and other spaces. Then there’s also community groups in our Māori iwi space, and we think of marae that actually have social workers in some parts of the country. I think of Tu Tama Wahine O Taranaki, an organisation in my community, who have been committed for more than 40 years in terms of doing the hard social work of family violence, the hard work of working with violent men, the hard work of working with wāhine, the hard work to actually find solutions and find hope and find liberation. We must say thank you to our social workers, who do so much for our communities and who do so much to build the social cohesion, whether it be in families, whether it be iwi hapū, whether it be in health, whether it be education, and all the other places I missed.

We do support this piece of legislation. It’s something that was reviewed five years ago, and it’s a five-yearly process that it goes through. I think and know that we need to continue to develop this legislation and, as we review it time after time, we need to strengthen it. I really believe, as I look through the legislation that is before us, it is another step in terms of ensuring—whether it be about accountability, whether it be around the protection not only of the social workers themselves but the people they’re working with, and the Minister made that clear in terms of checks and balances, and it’s important.

We need to make sure there is accountability, because our social workers are working so often with our most vulnerable, and we need to know that they are registered. We need to know that they have the skills not only to protect the people they work with but to protect themselves, because there are dynamic and volatile situations that they are so often in.

We have concerns, obviously, with what we believe the Government is doing, which is stripping away many of those social connections and the access. There was a report that was out not too long ago around restructuring and the work that was going on in Oranga Tamariki. It was pulling, actually, social workers away from the front line in terms of how they were operating, so we must be concerned.

As we support this legislation going forward, we support it with caution and with concern, but we always support it with the fact of having the community at our heart in what is going on. I won’t go on any further, but just to say let us be careful. I mean, the dream and the hope would be that social workers wouldn’t be needed in our communities, but it is just a reality. Let us make sure that we have the best systems, the best checks, and the best balances in place to make sure that our communities bring redemption, bring possibility, and enrich the lives of those who need it, whether it be in our hospitals, in our schools, in our child centres, or wherever it is. We commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. We are supporting this bill. I, too, want to pay tribute to all the social workers across Aotearoa, who are doing their best to support our communities, and I want to acknowledge, as well, the tertiary institutions that they train under.

This bill in and of itself is not radical, but it does include some practical changes such as broadening the scope of grounds for interim suspension where an investigation under the Social Workers Registration Act, under the Health and Disability Commissioner Act, or a criminal proceeding is “reasonably contemplated”, not just under way. The stuff around changing the extension period of interim suspension so that the suspension can be tied to the completion of investigation of medical examination, as well as other issues relating to the accountability that social workers face and issues relating to, for example, the cap on the number of social workers on the social workers disciplinary tribunal.

I think, to me, this raises a few really important issues, particularly having seen social workers at the front lines working with people on the benefit and supporting them to get their legal entitlements. Many of our social workers that are going through our tertiary institutions and then going to work themselves come from—many of them—lived experience backgrounds. In many of those cases, that means low-income communities. Having given guest lectures to social work students in the past, prior to becoming an MP, it was really clear that many of the challenges of the people who social workers face were faced by social workers themselves, including in their training. Many of them that are deployed in the field end up working on low wages and with high workloads. When we have a combination of those things, we actually create a recipe for the very same things this bill is trying to address, right, which are some of the mechanisms relating to accountability.

What this means is that, I guess, if what the Government is trying to do in this bill is improve some of those accountability mechanisms relating to conduct, for example, and how we deal with those, I think there’s also a need to then look at the working conditions in the training that we provide to social workers. I think, to me, we are then addressing the accountability mechanisms that happen once a social worker actually, for example, misbehaves or does something that isn’t right. Those mechanisms should absolutely be refined, and I think, to me, you know, it’s been a constructive experience at the Social Services and Community Committee trying to address those things.

If we want to set social workers up to be their best selves and to unlock their full potential, I think, to me, then this Government needs to continue looking at what other levers exist to them to make sure that the content of this bill isn’t just an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. To me, that includes issues around making sure that when social workers are doing their placements, they’re actually adequately supported and remunerated for their work. I say this because when I was a field educator for social workers in my previous employment, many of them would be having to work multiple jobs on top of their placement. What that means is that, when they’re doing their placement, they’re actually probably more worried about paying their bills than actually absorbing the knowledge that then prevents them from actually making the kinds of mistakes that land them in the sorts of situations—or potentially lands them suspended—which is something that this bill is trying to improve upon.

Again, I think we can all make speeches and sort of talk about—particularly from the Government side, who currently hold the levers—acknowledging the amazing work social workers do, but until they are supported to be their best selves, we are putting them in situations where they are more likely to make errors, often because of the stress they face.

We support this bill. We support the work the select committee did to look at the components of this bill, but, you know, I just want to say that our social workers deserve more than our thanks. They deserve bread and roses and the world, because, for many of them, what they are doing, it’s often, for example, stopping—they’re the conduit between communities and our Government agencies.

I think some of the stuff in the bill relating to, for example, creating more flexibility in relationship to the duration of suspension, you know, in relationship to particularly the provision around changing the extension period for in-term suspensions to tie it to periods that are reasonable and necessary for the board to complete a formal investigation and or medical examination—that specific provision I think is great, but it doesn’t look at the upstream effect and the upstream things we should be targeting.

Again, this bill is relatively minor, and it provides technical amendments, but I think, like with other bills, we have to look at it in the ecosystem of what else is happening in the field that our social workers are doing. I’ll give an example: the changes to emergency housing where you’re now likely to see more people rejected for emergency housing. That in and of itself puts pressure on our social workers, and that in practice actually means social workers will end up finding themselves working with people in situations of distress. They’ll be working with community members who may be facing chronic homelessness, who may then ask the question, “What am I to do and how am I supposed to be supported?” Those social workers, who are often on low wages and come from low-income backgrounds, many of them—from my own experiences—will then be facing additional stresses, which increases the chances of them doing something that may land them in the very same disciplinary spaces that this bill is improving.

I think, again, the Government needs to take a step back themselves and look at the broader legislative ecosystem that they’re creating this term and ask themselves the question: are we actually putting more pressure on social workers, or are we relieving them of the pressure to ensure that they can be their best selves? Personally, I think it’s the former, and that to me raises concerns about why this bill is taking priority over other issues that could improve the conditions that our social workers are in and prevent them from making mistakes.

Paid placements is something I referenced earlier. We have heard petitions on these issues in our select committees, calling for paid placements to be put in place so that not just social workers but other professions can fully unlock their potential, and, more importantly, so that we can also diversify our professions. There have been lots of calls and previous debates on, for example, the experience pathway as a tool to increase the diversity of the social work profession. When we are able to do that, we also actually prevent conditions in which a social worker who may not have the cultural competency is making mistakes with someone they’re walking alongside with and that ends up landing that person in disciplinary spaces.

Again, we support the measures included in this bill, because we none the less acknowledge that those very mechanisms of accountability could always be improved upon, but without looking upstream, I think the Government is just looking down the cliff instead of doing the necessary and systemic changes so that people don’t need a social worker in the first place, and that those social workers, when they are needed, are well remunerated, well supported, and well trained.

Simon Court: Madam Speaker.

This debate is interrupted and is set down for resumption next sitting day—sorry, Mr Court. The House stands adjourned until 2 p.m. on Tuesday, 11 March 2025.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 5.56 p.m.