Children's commissioner Dr Russell Wills says CYF is not the only agency that should be putting children at the centre of their service. Until they all do, CYF kids face a tough future.

A freeze on funding since 2010 has forced the Children's Commissioner to push out checks to make sure children are not being abused by carers.

The office, which is bound by law to carry out checks on Child Youth and Family (CYF) residences, was allocated $2.1 million in this year's Budget - the same amount it has received for the past five budgets.

The freeze continued despite commissioner Dr Russell Wills telling MPs his office had had to scale back the frequency with which it performed its monitoring obligations fro yearly to every 18 months.

"Like all public service chief executives, I have to cut my cloth for the resource I've got and do the best job I can," he told the Social Services Select Committee in March.

It was a "much more effective" way.

"Rather than going out to individual sites [of which there were 66], which is quite an expensive exercise to send a team of two or three, we take a look at the data Child Youth and Family show us, and get a sense of the range of practise."

Then the Office of the Children's Commissioner would choose sites that demonstrated both good and bad practices to pull together data for its own review.

It was also revealed during that meeting that yearly checks of the nine Youth Justice and Care Protection Facilities throughout the country, had been scaled back to every 18 months.

But the Office of the Children's Commissioner was not the only organisation forced to do more with less. The Office of the Chief Social Worker also undertook yearly reviews of children abused by caregivers.

CYF is now the subject of a widesweeping review, ordered by Tolley, to modernise its business and ultimately allow social workers to spend more time with children.

It came after a Ministry of Social Development Workload and Casework Review found social workers spend only a quarter of their time speaking with the children they're charged with protecting.

According to figures provided by Social Development Minister Anne Tolley, in the 2012/13 financial year, 30 approved Child, Youth and Family caregivers were found to have abused or neglected 37 children and young people.

Of the 30 caregivers, 11 were non-family/whanau caregivers who were found to have abused or neglected 18 of the 37 children.

And 19 were family/whanau caregivers who were found to have abused or neglected 19 children.

In the last financial year, 29 approved CYF caregivers were found to have abused or neglected 39 of their young charges.

Of those caregivers, seven were non-family who were found to have abused or neglected 11 children. Twenty-two were family members who were found to have abused or neglected 28 children.

Tolley said the Social Development Ministry had a "robust vetting system" for approving caregivers.

"In the instance when there is a report of concern about the abuse or neglect of a young person in care, the Ministry always acts immediately to ensure the safety of the child or young person.

"Child Youth and Family will undertake an investigation and where abuse or neglect is substantiated, the caregiver status will be revoked, and no additional children will be placed in their care."

Labour's spokeswoman for children Jacinda Ardern said the abuse figures showed the importance of the checks carried out by both CYFs and the Children's Commissioner.

"And they need to continue to have ongoing contact with those children once they're placed."

Ardern said that anecdotally, it seemed the checks weren't occurring.

"CYFs are just so pressed that it's essentially a dump, then on to the next case."

Ardern said the role of the Children's Commissioner was "vitally important".

"They're not just there to be advocates, they actually have an operational role," she said.

"The fact that their funding has been static, has to lead in the end for them to close their Auckland Office, and to reduce some services.

"I think the Children's Commissioner's been left with no choice but to do that, and at the same time you've got a Families Commission that's receiving more like $10 million worth of taxpayers funding."

"We would say get rid of the Families Commission and put more resources into the Children's Commission to make sure they can do their job properly."

Last year the Families Commission underwent a rebrand, with the policy research unit changing its name to SuperU. It received $10.1m in this year's Budget.