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12.15 pm
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Mr. John Bowis): I echo what has been said in saluting my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Kent (Mr. Rowe). His belief in and experience of social work and care shone through his speech. We owe him a great debt for bringing this subject to the House. I hope that it will lead to other debates on social work as that great area of professional work develops. I suspect that we also look forward to taking his Michelin guide on our travels around the country. "Eat out with your social worker" is a new concept.
When talking about a person with learning difficulties, my hon. Friend rightly talked about the need to understand people's needs, and even people. We must get the "Don't patronise me" message across. I have heard it said by people with learning difficulties. "Don't talk over my head", and "Don't talk down to me" are other messages that we should get across.
The same applies to my hon. Friend's message about that dreadful term "care leavers". As young people move from care to independence, we have a common duty to enable them to pick up the reins of adulthood and to benefit from their past care. We must ensure that they do not experience a sudden drop off. I endorse too what my hon. Friend said about volunteers. He is a specialist in that matter. We would do well to listen to him and to develop it much more.
I acknowledge too the complementary experience of the hon. Member for Wakefield (Mr. Hinchliffe). I always try to be helpful, so I will do my best to answer the request from old Labour to help to educate new Labour. It does not understand, he said, so I understand that request. We will do what we can over the coming months and years.
I agree with the hon. Gentleman's comments about the probation service and its role with the police, those involved in education and others, in diversionary work to help young people to avoid getting into difficulties that can lead to custody and other problems. That is an important matter. He talked about crisis intervention work, which, of course, is important. I hope that he was
not underestimating the emphasis that we have placed, through messages from research and other areas, on the need to concentrate on prevention, so that today's problem does not become tomorrow's crisis. I note too his interesting thoughts on the Industry and Parliament Trust. Perhaps not industry, but someone should, perhaps, be doing just that.
I acknowledge the comments of the hon. Member for Morley and Leeds, South (Mr. Gunnell) about social workers' role and job having challenges, stresses and strains. I hope, however, that we will take the opportunity not just to talk about the gloom and doom that may come from surveys, but to talk up and to celebrate social workers' achievements. Ultimately, that will do social workers and social care workers a greater favour than concentrating on the downside.
I salute the 1 million men and women working in the private, public and voluntary sectors who devote their careers to the care of the most vulnerable children and adults--from child welfare, child protection and child custody, to the mentally ill and people with physical, sensory or learning disabilities, to people who are frail of body or of mind, to addicts who abuse their bodies and their minds. We salute social care workers today, and I do so when I travel around the country and witness the dedication, care and creativity that characterises the work of the best of them.
We hear about cases of poor quality, political correctness, intrusiveness, rigidity and, sometimes--sadly--of downright wickedness. Such instances often catch the headlines and are rightly condemned, but they are not the reality of the vast majority of people working in social care, who provide high-quality service and daily perform tasks and make decisions that most of us would rather not perform and make.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Seebohm reforms, which not only founded modern local authority social services departments but created what has in effect become the fourth pillar of the welfare state, ranking alongside the NHS, social security and education. In the quarter of a century since Seebohm, each generation has brought its own perspective and innovation to social care. The hon. Member for Darlington (Mr. Milburn) reeled off some of the legislation that has been enacted in the interim. I am not sure that the hon. Gentleman mentioned the Children Act 1989, but I would add it to his list. Those measures are notable landmarks of change and, most recently, we have seen legislation and progress in respect of mental health, carers and direct payments.
This year, total social services spending, including DSS preserved rights spending on community care, has risen to £10 billion--a figure approaching the spend on NHS family health services. Local authorities are employing about 233,000 staff in the various sectors of personal social services, and about 90 per cent. of field social work staff are qualified. If the voluntary and private sectors are included, the figure rises to 1 million. During the past decade, there has been a considerable shift in clientele; more people now work in domiciliary and day care services and occupational therapy, reflecting a move away from residential provision. Social workers are engaged in a wide range of services for highly dependent people who are vulnerable by reason of age and condition, as well as in specialised services such as mental health, young offenders, adoption and fostering.
I pay unreserved tribute to the way in which front-line social workers and social services staff in general have responded to the challenges that they faced at a time of structural, service and ethos change. Local government reorganisation, new responsibilities for community care, care at home rather than in a home, expansion of the range and type of service provider, services tailored to people rather than people made to suit services and greater empowerment, independence and choice for service users are challenges that social workers in all sectors have striven to meet.
We have opened doors to real choice and dignity for people who need care services, and forward-looking social workers and social service directors welcome that development. Making a difference to the lives of the people who, to a greater or lesser extent, rely on social care does not and should not mean taking over or controlling their lives. The values and ethos of social service professions have developed over the past 10 years into a general movement towards the real empowerment of service users. The whole thrust of social service changes, whether in respect of adults or children, has been to give users a greater say in the care support that they are given and a stronger voice in the way in which they are helped to live their lives. That movement has been reflected in the wide range of policy and practice changes that, through legislation and guidance, we have encouraged or required authorities to adopt.
In social services, the human and social values underlying the citizens charter were already well developed by the time that they were set out in the community care charter--for example, through the direction on choice for people needing residential care. Community care reforms put a new emphasis on consulting service users and their carers fully.
The Children Act 1989, and its regulations and guidance, make the interests, wishes and feelings of the child paramount whenever practicable in decisions affecting his or her future. Complaints procedures were established with a genuinely independent element. In all, the greater involvement and stronger voice of service users in all aspects of their care that has been led by social workers enables social workers to do their jobs in ways that should preserve people's real dignity.
While there is much to applaud in the difficult and complex work performed by social workers, we recognise that, sometimes, things go wrong. At the lower end of the scale of seriousness, there are still to be found occasional examples of a faded and outmoded political correctness. Many hon. Members will have had complaints from independent sector providers concerning the over-zealous regulation that persists in some areas--the sort of thinking that found its way into parts of the first draft of what was then known as "Home Life 2", which the House debated not long ago. My Department has issued practice guidance to restore a proper balance in the way that adoptions are handled.
Mr. Rowe:
Perhaps my hon. Friend is underplaying some complaints from the private sector, which feels strongly and has evidence that there is more than just bureaucratic discrimination--that ethos discrimination makes life extremely difficult for the private sector.
Mr. Bowis:
My hon. Friend makes an important point. I hope that the discrimination that is felt in some parts of
At the other end of the scale of seriousness is abuse. We all appreciate the careful and dedicated work that social services put into child protection. There is no knowing how many catastrophes and how much suffering have been prevented. I recognise that the work of many staff in helping young people to rebuild their lives often goes unrecorded. Many cases of abuse uncovered in recent years occurred 20 or 30 years ago, sometimes in facilities outside the social services or for which local authorities did not at the time have the same responsibility that they do now.
None of us can feel comfortable about failures at member or manager level to discharge the responsibility of protection from abuse. I am glad of the welcome given to Sir William Utting's thorough review of safeguards, to ascertain whether they are adequate. Sir William will bring forward any recommendations that he thinks fit, and we will study them carefully.
Regulatory and management safeguards, and the regulation of social services personnel, are also important. We intend to issue before the summer recess a consultation document that will describe and report positively on suggested standards of conduct and competence that we commissioned from groups led by the National Institute for Social Work and Price Waterhouse. That work has shown that such standards can be articulated in social services. The consultation document will seek views on the various possible mechanisms for disseminating and enforcing professional standards.
One mechanism is the creation of a statutory council, broadly of the kind used to regulate standards in other caring professions. I fully understand the wish of many people working in social services and of the all-party panel for a general social services council, and I am aware of growing support among social service employers for such a council.
Our consultation document will give full weight to those views, widen the canvas of discussion to user and wider consumer interests that have not so far contributed substantially to the debate, and outline practical issues. A large number of people work in social services, but not all social care--particularly at the sharp end, involving vulnerable groups--is provided by people with backgrounds suitable for registration with a professional body.
Existing statutory councils in other professions have never found it easy to spot in advance individuals who are subsequently found--for example, after disciplinary proceedings or criminal conviction--to be unsuitable to work with vulnerable people. Nor have they invariably concluded that it is just or reasonable that individuals whose registration has been removed or suspended should be permanently banned from practising their vocations. Our consultation document will--I hope constructively--expose those issues, which we certainly realise must be tackled.
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