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11.24 am
Mr. David Hinchliffe (Wakefield): I am grateful to be able to participate in this debate. First, I must pay tribute to the hon. Member for Mid-Kent (Mr. Rowe) for securing it and for his championing of the social work cause in this place--he has certainly done so during the nine years that I have been here. I also pay tribute to his previous role as the chair of the all-party panel on personal social services. The work that he did with that group for many years was widely appreciated on both sides of the House and throughout social work.
The hon. Gentleman's speech was a little like mine will be--a case of "All Our Yesterdays". He remarked on the length of time that had elapsed since the Seebohm report, which revolutionised personal social services, which reminded me that I trained around the time of the Seebohm changes. I began training in social work in a specialist field and, by the time I had qualified, generic social work was required--people who could cover every area of social work specialisms.
The debate is timely. I am more conscious than ever that social workers are perhaps in a no-win situation. I get angry in this Chamber when I hear some of the comments about social workers, which are based on a profound ignorance--comments from Opposition as well as Conservative Members. I hope that one of the issues that will arise in the debate is how we can better inform some of our colleagues about the skills and tasks mentioned in the hon. Gentleman's introductory speech. I know from bitter experience that social workers are in a no-win situation. Whatever one does in an individual case, one is taking the wrong decision in someone's eyes. I have been lambasted on many occasions, physically assaulted and attacked in the media for doing my job in local authority social work.
I am conscious that social workers have to take decisions daily, particularly on child protection, and that, in the case of individual children at risk, someone will think that the decision is profoundly wrong and will attack the social worker. It concerns me that there is insufficient awareness, particularly in the House, among the Government and the Opposition, of the problems that are faced when one is coming to a proper decision, particularly in a child protection case.
We should all be aware of the way in which changes in community care have placed local authority social workers in an increasingly difficult situation. The court ruling last week, for example, reminded us of the role that social workers play within local authorities as gatekeepers for scarce resources. They often have to tell people, "Yes, we recognise your needs, but sadly the resources are not available to meet those requirements."
I appreciate this brief chance to consider some of the issues that concern people in various areas of social work, which is under attack as never before from elements
within the Government. I exempt the hon. Member for Mid-Kent and the Minister, but I am sure that they will accept that some of their colleagues, as well as some highly irresponsible people in the media and some people in my party, are ignorant as to what social work is about and what tasks social workers face daily.
I was struck by an article in February in Professional Social Work--a magazine to which the hon. Member for Mid-Kent referred--which is the magazine of the British Association of Social Workers. The article mentioned the campaign against social workers at a national level, saying:
One of the major problems faced by social work throughout its history is that its very existence is a permanent reminder to politicians of their failure to deal with a range of social and political issues. At least 50 per cent. of the individual cases with which I had to deal during my time in social work, were related to or caused by material problems and not by personal relationships within the family.
I am conscious of the fact that, in recent times, the gap between the rich and the poor has widened. That is certainly the case in my constituency, and I suspect that it is the same elsewhere. The role of social work has been concerned more and more with dealing with those who have missed out on material wealth and a decent standard of living. Low incomes, unemployment and bad housing are often the basic reasons for social worker involvement. Other related factors may have led to referrals, but those are the root causes resulting in the involvement of, particularly, local authority social workers and organisations such as the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
To some extent, attacks on social work and social workers are often a camouflage for a failure to address those material issues. Those who attack social workers are often the very people who are not prepared to get their hands dirty by looking at the reasons why social workers are involved with people facing difficulties in their material circumstances. I am not just attacking the Government when I say that. My party needs to reflect on one or two of its recent announcements, which betray a naivety about the root causes of some of our social problems.
The announcement about curfew orders nicely sums up the problem that I am illustrating. Superficially, the idea may appear attractive and many people might say, "Yes, we need that." However, beyond the soundbite politics, we need to look in detail at why such an idea might be suggested. It does not deal with the reason why we have a significant number of out-of-control youngsters roaming the streets or why those youngsters are in certain parts of our constituencies. It does not deal with wholesale family and community breakdown and the way in which we have ghettoised the poor in recent times. My party must look in greater detail at some of the issues when it comes to
office, because one or two of us will not be happy with superficial suggestions about sweeping the streets and getting people back into their houses. We need to look at what is going on in those houses and what is going on between families and communities. One or two people are not thinking as deeply about that as they should be.
I am worried by the fact that some highly effective social work is under attack from the Home Office. The hon. Member for Mid-Kent did not mention the probation and after-care service. I accept that we are talking to a Minister from the Department of Health who is responsible for personal social services, but social work is an issue that covers other Departments. The role of probation officers now is worthy of examination. Of all the social work activities in recent years, the probation and after-care service has shone through as an example of success. It has diverted people away from offending and dealt with the rehabilitation of offenders.
I suspect that the Minister is as uneasy as I am about the Government's attack on probation officers and the idea that we should introduce some sort of militaristic attitude that will toughen up the service and offer a different response to offenders. I believe that we are ignoring the tremendous achievements that have been made in probation work recently, and I hope that the Minister will press his colleagues in the Home Office to review again their thinking about the future of the probation and after-care service.
I quoted from Professional Social Work, the magazine of the British Association of Social Workers. The article refers to social work becoming a technical activity. We should consider that issue. I am conscious of the fact that a deliberate consequence of recent policy is that we are moving away from what I saw as the basic job of befriending, counselling and assisting people, and towards the technical and administrative side of Government legislation. We need to look at what that means for the future role of social work and the training of social workers.
I was fortunate to be involved with the Standing Committee that dealt with the Children Act 1989. I remember vividly the feeling across parties that, with that piece of legislation, we had achieved a major breakthrough for the future well-being of children. I am proud to have been involved in that, and I pay tribute to all hon. Members on both sides of the House who were also involved.
My concern is that the implementation of that legislation has concentrated specifically on the technical aspects, a sort of legalism about whether one can intervene in a child protection case. That concentration has been largely at the expense of what I thought was the philosophy of the legislation--prevention. I believe that the real philosophy behind that legislation was a reminder that the real work with children and young people should be preventive, and that crisis intervention is only one small part of what we expect to see. I am worried that we are concentrating too much on that technical activity and that a whole raft of policies involved with prevention are being forgotten. I do not blame local authorities for that. I appreciate that they have to deal with crisis intervention in a way that perhaps none of us could have anticipated a few years ago.
The other piece of legislation that has gone through the House during my time here is the National Health Service and Community Care Act 1990. The hon. Member for
Mid-Kent talked about the increased resources coming into local authority social work. I think that he made the point that many of those resources relate to the transfer of social security functions to local authorities. That legislation brought about the assessment process and the care management process. I was talking only yesterday to someone in charge of a social work course in a university in West Yorkshire. He said that we should be looking at producing accountants from social work courses, because the job that they have to do in care management and managing scarce resources at local authority level requires technical skills that they are not being offered by current social work training.
The recent supervised discharge order--the legislation that went through the House last year--concentrates on a narrow, technical area of mental health. I am worried that many of the wider issues in mental health, which relate to how people function in the community, particularly those coming out of psychiatric hospitals, are not being looked at. The legislation concentrates on one aspect--the supervision of people in the community who have a serious mental disorder.
That is the media agenda. The media agenda for community care is that it has failed. It has not failed. Under successive Governments, it has been a tremendous success, but we are seeing a concentration on a small number of tragic cases, and social workers get the blame. Sadly, we are responding to that media agenda by introducing legislation that marginalises the role of social workers into one small technical element. I am not doubting the importance of that technical element, but it is at the expense of a range of other important issues.
I endorse entirely the points made by the hon. Member for Mid-Kent on NVQs and the training of people who are not academic highfliers. People such as home carers are fundamental to social work. I want to concentrate on the training of social work professionals who attain social work qualifications, but I do not doubt that we need to consider carefully the hon. Gentleman's points about NVQs and the basic training of people who do crucial jobs, such as home care and caring, perhaps in residential social work, at a basic care rather than a managerial level.
We must address the issue of the length of professional social work courses. We are way behind other European countries in having only a two-year course. I am conscious that three years' training is squashed into two, as a direct result of which we lose out on quality. There is immense concern in professional social work about the lack of degree status for qualified social workers.
As the hon. Gentleman said, the complexity of modern social work has increased tremendously. He said that there have been 50 Acts of Parliament since 1979 which have changed the role of social workers. Sadly, their training does not reflect those tremendous changes, which he rightly identified.
I am also concerned about the lack of training for residential social workers. It is to our cost that we have allowed a deterioration in the number of people being trained for residential social work. The inquiries currently under way as a result of events in Clwyd and elsewhere in Britain will no doubt pinpoint the fact that the lack of proper training for residential social workers is a significant problem.
I also welcome the hon. Gentleman's comments on the current arrangements for practice placements for those undertaking professional training. Local authorities face huge difficulties in responding to the requirements of the Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work for practice placements for people on professional social work courses.
I understand that the revenue support grant makes some assumption of funding for practice placements, but the message from local authorities, which believe in proper social work training, is that such funding goes nowhere near provision of the necessary resources.
I endorse the point made about the general social services council. We come back time and again on issue after issue to the need for a professional register of people involved in social work. I hope that the Minister will be able to say that progress is being made on that. There is cross-party acceptance of the need for such a model. People who see damage done to people through bad practice in social work arising from the lack of a professional register are a little impatient.
Hospital social work increasingly gives rise to all sorts of problems as a result of the relationship between local authorities and health care. I should have liked to say more on that, but I am conscious that time is limited. That area has not been sufficiently discussed in the context of recent changes in community care.
"This campaign is aimed not at the power of social workers as a professional group--which is minimal--but at their symbolic position as negotiators of citizenship for the disenfranchised.
That sums up many of the issues pointed out by the hon. Gentleman and many of the problems faced by social workers in defending the work they do now.
If it succeeds, social work will become a technical activity in which tasks are separated from creative helping, and ethics are seen as irrelevant."
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