Number and Profile of Cases Handled by Family Service Centres and Number of Social Workers Employed at These Centres

Mr Louis Ng Kok Kwang asked the Minister for Social and Family Development for FY2021 and FY2022 respectively (a) what is the total number of (i) group 2 cases, (ii) group 3 cases and (iii) group 4 cases that are handled by the Family Service Centres (FSCs); and (b) what is the total number of social workers employed by the FSCs.

The Senior Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Social and Family Development (Mr Eric Chua) (for the Minister for Social and Family Development): Sir, cases with higher risk and complexity under the Family Service Centre Code of Social Work Practice (FSC-CSWP) are assigned higher CSWP groupings.

In Financial Years (FYs) 2021 and 2022, the total number of cases across all groups handled by the FSCs were about 20,500 and 18,900 respectively. Similar to previous years, about 73% of the cases in FY2022 were group 2, 22% were group 3 and about 5% were group 4 cases.

There were about 1,000 social workers managing cases in FSCs in FY2021 and FY2022.

Mr Speaker: Mr Louis Ng.

Mr Louis Ng Kok Kwang (Nee Soon): Thank you, Sir, and I thank the Senior Parliamentary Secretary for the reply. I think that looking at the data that was presented, it looks like there is an increasing number of caseloads, but a similar number of social workers.

Could I ask the Ministry of Social and Family Development (MSF) whether they feel that there are sufficient social workers at this point, and if there is a shortfall, what are the plans to increase the number of social workers?

Mr Eric Chua: Mr Speaker, I think that the Member might have misheard me, because I mentioned that from FY2021, it was an aggregate total number of 20,500 cases and for FY2022, it was 18,900. If you compare these two years, actually, there was a decrease.