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Mr. Norris: I shall give way to the hon. Gentleman, who has prosecuted this case with assiduity. I hope that he will be brief.
Mr. Loyden: Have any of the organisations that will be on the return voyage to the wreck voiced any objection to the DFA being part of the team?
Mr. Norris: My understanding is that British Shipbuilders has indeed indicated its concern at allowing a DFA representative on board. I do not want to offer the DFA technical or legal advice, but I really think that those who clamour for a DFA representative on the ship should be aware of the extent to which the integrity of the expedition could be questioned if a representative of the DFA were allowed on the vessel but other interested parties were not. If that were allowed, the implications for the families of those on the Derbyshire--the DFA itself--would be very serious. The Department has no interest whatever in allowing information to be concealed from the DFA or anyone else. The manner in which the call for attendance has been made is simply misguided, and for very important reasons.
Mr. Frank Cook: Is it not a basic tenet of this country that for justice to be done it must be seen to be done? Would it not therefore make sense to have representatives of all
interested parties on the vessel so that they can see that their interests are being fully served? If none of them is allowed on board, they will not know whether they are or not.
Mr. Norris: It is clear that there are only two possibilities. One is that none of the representatives be allowed to be included, and the other is that all be allowed. I do not want to speculate on that because I do not have time to do so and it would not be appropriate. There is no question whatever about the integrity of the independent assessors, or about the integrity or impartiality of the European Union assessor. There is no question whatever of those assessors being compromised by the presence on the vessel of officials of the Department of Transport or the MAIB.
In such circumstances, attendance of a representative of the DFA, unaccompanied by representatives of all other parties who may have a substantial and direct interest in the investigation's outcome, would be prejudicial to the prospects of the DFA and its interests. If the hon. Member for Stockton, North (Mr. Cook) wants to pursue the notion that, somehow, all parties should be represented, I am sure that he will do so. I stress that the representation is in the interests of all concerned.
There have also been calls for media representation and direct transmission equipment on board. I assure the House that all interested parties will be given access to the raw data that are retrieved, but direct satellite links or other media involvement would be wholly inappropriate. The media will not be represented on phase 1. The expedition will simply be concerned with gathering photographic evidence. A final decision will be taken nearer the time on whether the media will be included in phase 2,
In the minute that remains, I should make it quite clear that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, his predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough (Dr. Mawhinney), who I know took a great personal interest in the matter and whose decision it was to call on Lord Donaldson to examine the prospects of this further inquiry, and my noble Friend Lord Goschen have all made it absolutely clear that their interest, like mine, is in ensuring that, if there is anything to be learned from the wreck of the Derbyshire, it is learned in the interests of those who carry out their business in the great waters of the oceans and whose lives we all have a duty to protect.
I know that we will never be able to satisfy all those who feel aggrieved about the circumstances of past investigations.
The Department believes that it is now time to move forward, and we can do that only if all parties co-operate and share their knowledge and expertise, to establish what lessons can be learned in relation to the future safety of bulk carriers. I know that the people in the Department, including Mr. Frank Wall, whose correspondence has been mentioned, have at all times acted in a conscientious and concerned way, which is a great credit to their objectivity and to their tenacity in attempting to uphold the highest possible standards of discovery and disclosure.
Mr. Andrew Rowe (Mid-Kent):
It is 25 years since the Seebohm report revolutionised the provision of social work and social services in England, and slightly longer since the Kilbrandon report did the same in Scotland. I do not want to suggest at any stage during the debate that we should arrive at the position that Lord Kilbrandon once boldly described by saying that, if we went on as we were, we would soon need a professional qualification to help an old woman across the road. None the less, this is an apposite time for a debate on social work.
When we talk about social work, who or what do we mean? First, we are talking about the fastest growing area of local government spending. Between 1990-91 and 1996-97, there has been a 67 per cent. increase in real terms; in the 25 years since Seebohm, there has been a tenfold increase in real terms. Expenditure this year in England was £7.3 billion--or £9.2 billion if the expenditure that falls to the Department of Social Security is included, as it should be.
Social work involves a huge work force. In September 1995, there were 228,000 people in the United Kingdom armed services. At the same time, there were 238,000 full-time equivalents in local authority social services in England alone. Of those, about 53,000 are qualified social workers. That is a slightly complex figure, and I am not sure that I shall not contradict it later in my speech; finding my way through some of the figures has been quite difficult.
If we include all the cleaners, caterers and so on who work for social services departments, the work force amounts to almost 1 million people, yet we seldom discuss those people in the House. When there are scandals, the media love to hunt for those responsible, in the process further damaging the public image of social workers, yet social workers and social work budgets are charged with undertaking, on behalf of us all, responsibilities that we as citizens find too painful, too difficult or too dangerous to undertake for ourselves. They deserve a debate of their own in this place.
I wonder how many hon. Members are currently sustaining elderly or damaged relatives. How many of us have already turned, or will shortly turn, to social services to help us with that task? Social work is not a remote esoteric service that few of us will encounter personally. It touches most families in the land sooner or later, and it touches them at deeply sensitive points. Families fragment faster in this country than they do almost anywhere else in Europe--800,000 children have no contact with their natural fathers, the number of girls under 16 who conceive children grows every year, and 67,000 young people are in the care of local authorities, either directly or through fostering. I shall say more about those young people later.
What sort of people are social workers? The popular view, fuelled by throwaway jibes in the media, is that they are young dolly birds fresh from college with no experience of life, who are easily thrown by encounters with practical mothers of six whose chief problems are too small a house or too small an income. Like most stereotypes, that image is wrong. Two thirds of social workers were aged 30 or more when they started their social work training, and 50 per cent. were over 35. Many already have qualifications in other fields.
If I list some of what social workers need to know, it will be seen both how complex their job is, and how important training for it is. Social workers are supposed to know about new legislation. Since 1979--I say this with some guilt--more than 50 Acts of Parliament have laid additional responsibilities on social workers. They are also supposed to know about new service arrangements, relevant research findings, how society is organised, the needs of different groups of people, the symptoms and treatment of mental health problems, including those resulting from alcohol or drugs, and about criminality and anti-social behaviour. They are also expected to know about the benefits system--we in the House know how often we alter that--as well as how to assess the strengths and weaknesses of families and other relevant networks, and how to work with families and carers in partnership.
What is more, social workers need to know how to protect themselves against both violence--they are more vulnerable to violence and assault even than the police--and stress. One of the scandals of the present organisation of social services departments is how few of them have in place the kind of support for stressed colleagues that is now commonplace in the fire services and in the police. If ever there were a case of "Physician, heal thyself," this must be it.
The profession is unlike most others in that women outnumber men--by 2:1 as managers, by 3:1 as social workers and by 4:1 as residential workers. Almost all home care staff are women. But in the higher reaches of management, men still outnumber women. That is partly, but only partly, because 90 per cent. of the men, but only 51 per cent. of the women, are full-time workers. Moreover, 20 per cent. of staff have a child under 12 or an elderly relative to care for, which adds considerably to the stress. Black and Asian staff are prominent in the profession and, interestingly, tend to be better qualified than other staff. It is a scandal that almost half of them have experienced racism from fellow workers and social work management.
We are talking about an enormously complex and deeply sensitive task that takes workers into the very heart of the human condition. They are expected to control access to, and to ration on our behalf, the resources provided by the taxpayer--resources that are huge but still, by definition, inadequate. As the demands grow, they must refuse more often, and then accept the anger and despair of those to whom they deny help.
Social workers are daily exposed to situations that raise in them doubts and fears about their own lives and circumstances. How many people can confront a crumbling marriage or a disruptive child without asking questions about their own marriage or children? They must also give authoritative advice about entitlements and legal issues, and argue with professionals in other areas, such as the police, teachers, doctors and magistrates.
What is the training base on which social workers stand to do all that? I am afraid that it is pretty thin. Almost half of social services staff have no professional qualification at all, and the certificate of qualification in social work, which is held by 82 per cent. of professionally qualified staff, is only a two-year qualification. Peter Smallridge, Kent's director of social services, has pointed out that his staff are frequently involved in working with colleagues in Europe, although they are ineligible for employment in the EU because every other country in the EU has a three-year qualification.
My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State told the Association of Directors of Social Services how vital research and information is to effective service planning and delivery. He said:
Secondly, care managers are key personnel in the assessment of care needs and the management of budgets and resources, as well as in ensuring the quality of service. I wonder whether we are doing enough to equip them for their increasingly demanding and technology-based role.
Thirdly, there is the added load on staff caused by the switch to user-led services. Citizens charters and the statutory recognition of carers have combined with the professional ethos of social work--which has always demanded that the client's wishes be taken fully into account--to raise user expectation and, rightly, to undermine the former tendency to prescribe solutions that the client meekly accepted. That puts further demands on staff at all levels, and it demands training.
Fourthly, there is the horrifying statistic that almost half of all social services staff have no professional qualification. This means that most staff in residential homes, for example--where many of the most difficult and demanding clients are to be found--provide service with little or no formal recognition of their expertise, or lack of it. Research has found that most of them want to acquire qualifications, but have the least information on training opportunities.
In passing, may I plead for the retention of NVQ level 1 as an invaluable doorway for ill-equipped school leavers into qualification? A similar dearth of qualification is to be found in home care workers. That must be addressed. By looking across the Chamber, I see that I have no need to say any more about the registration of home care workers. I understand the Government's reluctance to incur the expense of a third year of pre-qualifying training, but I urge my hon. Friend--whose reputation is deservedly growing year by year--to acknowledge the importance of upgrading the training of this key profession.
One possibility put forward by Peter Smallridge, among others, is a post-qualification year, supported by academic assessments of assignments on subjects such as multidisciplinary assessment or work-oriented research. That would help my hon. Friend to meet the objectives set by the Secretary of State.
There are three other issues that I wish to raise. First, we have an occupation that employs almost 1 million people in total and deals with the most damaged, difficult and threatening people in society, and there is no regulatory mechanism to govern it. There is nothing in place to stop a worker who has been sacked for bad practice in one authority instantly finding work in another. There are virtually no means of checking on someone's claims of either qualification or experience, and it is high time there were.
The idea of a general council has been in the air since I taught at Edinburgh university 30 years ago, and I believe it to be necessary. I should prefer it to look rather like the Michelin guide, listing what people have done
and providing an indication of their qualifications--such as a rosette for having done a diploma in social work. A knife and fork for having achieved NVQ level 2 is perhaps a little further than we need to go, but the proposition that it should be a register of what people can do and the qualifications that they have achieved seems to fit in with the post-NVQ culture and to be a great deal more useful than merely a list, which can get rapidly out of date. In other words, it should be inclusive rather than exclusive. It should begin by listing those with qualifications, and move on to include the rest. But the idea that there is no mechanism for controlling the ethics or practice of social workers is dangerously bizarre.
The second issue is volunteers. Survey after survey has shown that how a service is delivered matters almost as much as what the service is. I ran, as I have told the House before, a day in Coventry called "Heirs to the Millennium", at which 750 people came together to talk about how we bring up, or fail to bring up, children. On that day, we heard a client with learning difficulties demand that social workers should not patronise her; they should neither prejudge on the basis of where she lives, nor brush her aside if she dares to challenge what they say. That complaint is frequently heard--that social workers are all very well when it comes to empathising, until someone questions what they have said, whereupon they become highly authoritarian and rather cross.
Children in local authority care tell us that the worst thing for them is when a worker fails to turn up as promised. Children in care are a particular worry. Again and again we learn of children, whose overriding need is for stability and continuing affection, getting a new worker--sometimes as often as every two or three weeks. It is a scandal that so many of the 67,000 children in our care suffer so much insecurity before leaving public care, very often into nothing satisfactory. This is where, pre-eminently, volunteers can help.
A volunteer who commits him or herself on a continuing basis can provide a depth and length of care that statutory departments can seldom attain. The same is true of residential homes for the elderly. If we want to reduce the abuse of vulnerable clients, there are few better mechanisms than a steady stream of volunteers passing in and out of residential establishments, building a trusting relationship with a client or two inside.
My local director has told me that one of his ambitions is to remove what he regards as the ghetto effect of putting up a notice saying that a home is run by Kent county council. He says that that is as effective as putting a moat around the home in cutting it off from the local community, who instantly feel that the home has nothing to do with them. I certainly endorse his ambition.
Similarly, volunteers can reduce the demand for service. Homestart, which supports vulnerable families on a long-term basis, can show clearly how it has been able to prevent families from breaking up and becoming a complete charge on public funds. Drop-in centres for people of different age groups are important. One of the things about which we in Coventry heard more than anything else was that young people need somewhere to go to meet their friends, rather than simply walking the streets, prey to every possible opportunity for causing trouble.
Neutral meeting places where divorced fathers can take their children are another crying need. Many fathers who get down for the day find themselves at an endless
succession of McDonald's and cafes, because there is nowhere to go. What they need more than anything else is quiet time with their children, and drop-in centres staffed by sensitive and welcoming volunteers are proving wonderfully successful in the small number of places where they operate.
In social work, the opportunities for volunteering are endless. Professional social workers need to learn how to stimulate volunteer help, work confidently with it and sustain, with their professionalism, the volunteers. It used to be thought a threat to the professional if volunteers muscled in on the act but, increasingly, people realise that such work is an extension of the arm of the professional.
Thirdly, it would be wrong in a debate on this subject to avoid scandal and malpractice. While it is true that many of the shocking cases that have recently come to light arose before the latest reorganisations, the danger will always be with us. Vulnerable people attract abusers, and there will always be abuse in local authority homes, private homes and elsewhere. What matters is that effective mechanisms should be in place to discover abuse promptly and root it out.
Some vulnerable people, especially children, develop strategies for survival that depend on manipulating those who work with them. Teachers, social workers, doctors and others are increasingly vulnerable to false claims made against them, or to being seduced into inappropriate behaviour. The balance is never going to be an easy one to strike. Evidence suggests that, more often than not, children should be believed, but it also suggests that children will talk to professionals of any kind less readily than to relatives or friends.
Social work cannot and should not be expected to be a ministry of happiness or to have a goal of eliminating all the sources of unhappiness and distress that social workers come across. When things go wrong, we have a duty to respond in a measured rather than a convulsive way. Social workers also have a duty to keep their heads. One of the more depressing features of the correspondence columns in Community Care is how often students choose research projects based on the latest scandal. Such prurient interest simply feeds back into the loop, fuelling still further the eagerness of the press and others to extract the maximum stimulation from other people's tragedies while clobbering social work along the way.
The evidence about morale among social workers is confusing. The National Institute of Social Work survey suggested that most social workers enjoy what they do and a surprisingly high percentage claim that they would go on doing it even if they were rich enough not to have to work. The survey carried out by Professional Social Work, however, claimed that more than one third would not have joined the profession if they had known what it was like, and that 66 per cent. of those who work in the health service want to leave. I cannot possibly judge between the two surveys, but my hon. Friend the Minister needs to know that signs of strain are developing, and he should take steps to head it off.
11 am
"I regard it as essential to have a vigorous and well-targeted research base for social services".
Research methodology, as well as its application, requires skills that a crowded two-year basic training course is unlikely to impart effectively enough to meet my right hon. Friend's goal.
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