HC Deb 03 July 1996 vol 280 cc905-25

11 am

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: 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.

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 cafés, 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.

Finally, social work is indispensable. We depend on it, but we must ask ourselves two basic questions: why do we depend on it and should we depend on it so much? One of the key messages of Coventry was that each one of us should remember our responsibility for our fellow citizens.

The huge and rapid growth in social work is partly a reflection of the fragmentation of families, partly an effect of longevity and partly the result of an increase in public expectations that someone somewhere will pick up our pieces for us. It is also a reflection of the readiness of each one of us to shuffle off on to professionals responsibilities that, if we stopped to think, we could often take on. I am glad to have had the chance to thank the staff who take on those responsibilities for me, but there is much to be done if we are to raise their standards and self-esteem proportionate to the expectations we have of them.

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: 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. If it succeeds, social work will become a technical activity in which tasks are separated from creative helping, and ethics are seen as irrelevant. 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.

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 arid 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.

Education social work has not been mentioned and I put in a plea for more consideration to be given to the valuable role of education social workers, in assisting young people to make the best of their education. The announcement last week of more selection will result in more people being written off. I was one of those who were written off at the age of 11, so I feel strongly on that point. People who drop out of the system need attention, and education social work has a role to play in that.

Finally, I make one plea which I hope will be taken up on both sides of the House as a result of today's debate. There is complete and utter shameful ignorance in this place of the role of social work. I commend the hon. Member for Mid-Kent for flying the flag for social work for many years. We should press the Industry and Parliament Trust to consider placing Members of Parliament from both sides of the House in various types of social work, just as it places them in business. Labour Members need that as much as Conservative Members—increasingly, with new Labour. I hope that we shall consider that suggestion seriously. There are hon. Members who do not have a clue about what is going on in social work, and who should have the chance to learn before they open their mouths in the Chamber.

11.44 am
Mr. John Gunnell (Morley and Leeds, South)

I join my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Mr. Hinchliffe) in paying tribute to the hon. Member for Mid-Kent (Mr. Rowe). The only two Conservative Members of Parliament who have taken an active interest in social services since I have been a Member of the House, which I recognise is rather a brief time, come, I believe, from Kent.

I recognise the value of the work done by the hon. Member for Mid-Kent over the years. My hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield was a principal social worker in the area that I represent, so I know that he has handled difficult case work, and he brings his active experience to the House.

It is clear from today's debate—Labour Members might have their minds on a further meeting that is due to take place shortly—that relatively few Members take an active interest in the issue that we are discussing. That is a pity, but it is important that we should continue to act together. On most of the issues that we shall talk about, there is a genuine cross-party view.

It is important that we make progress on those issues. It is notable that, in perhaps the most important domestic crises to be brought to the House in recent days—the abuse in north Wales, which is now the subject of an inquiry, to which I shall return, and the Dunblane massacre—those involved might not have committed such atrocities had appropriate action been taken earlier.

We can learn things from those tragedies, which will be extremely important to the way in which we think in future. This is not an area where we need deregulation; we need increased regulation. My hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield attempted to introduce the idea of regulation in domiciliary care. It is important that people who go into other people's homes should have a measure of trust, and that their credentials should have been examined.

The process of vetting has been raised by the Dunblane massacre and events in Clwyd and will clearly be studied by Sir William Utting in the report that he is preparing for the House. I hope that that will result in recommendations on which we can act in order to safeguard the clients of social workers, those in residential care and those whose homes are visited by people as agents of social services or the community performing acts related to community care. It is important that such people are vetted, that the vetting procedures continue, that they take place rather more rapidly than is often the case today, and that we ensure that there are proper safeguards for the public in the way in which the services are organised.

The hon. Member for Mid-Kent and my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield raised many important points which I need not repeat. I have no professional experience in this area, but I have experience as chair of the social services committee in a major city. Anyone who is chair of a social services committee rapidly recognises the valuable work that social workers undertake, and, as the hon. Member for Mid-Kent said, the real danger in which they find themselves. I read that those dangers come more frequently from people under mental stress, which we must take into account when attempting to legislate to minimise the dangers for people who work with such clients. Although I recognise that it is impossible to make the job completely free from danger, it is possible to ensure that help is at hand most of the time when the work is being done.

People recognise the responsibility that social workers have, if for no other reason than that given by my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield: when they make a mistake, it often has serious effects on people's lives, and if it becomes public knowledge, they receive regrettable media attention. It is important that the training of which the hon. Member for Mid-Kent spoke is put in place, because the decisions that social workers take are sensitive. He made it clear that there is a lack of training at present. It is important that we have a sensitive understanding of the job that has to be done. There is a narrow line in the decisions that social workers have to take in many cases—about an individual client, about removing a child from home. Those decisions are finely balanced, and must be treated with understanding. There must be the necessary protection for the social worker, but our primary job is to legislate for the protection of the clients.

There is serious evidence of a crisis of morale among social workers. The hon. Member for Mid-Kent mentioned two reports. In fact, both teach us aspects of the truth about social workers. Many people find it an extremely satisfying activity and would not exchange it for any other, and many people involve themselves in social work voluntarily because of the satisfaction that they get from the assistance that they can give. But a survey in Professional Social Work, in conjunction with the university of Central Lancashire, has some important lessons for us. It is a mistake to ignore its data, because they say something about social work as a profession today.

The survey tells us: Half of the profession has considered leaving social work in the past three years—mostly because of stress, frustration at lack of resources and the feeling that they are not doing the job they were trained for. That is a serious figure, which we should examine. We should look at the frequency of stress among social workers, because, having been close to them through my role in the city council and my continuing relationship with people who do that work in my constituency, I see the signs of stress. I hear of instances in which stress causes individuals to leave the profession or to have long periods of absence.

According to the survey, which covered a large number of social workers—1,391—some 49.8 per cent. had had stress problems in the previous year. Those problems may not have been serious, but the social workers were asked to outline the effects that that stress had on them. Some 15.6 per cent. suggested that they had physical illness as a result of stress in their work; others felt that they had sleep problems as a result.

Removing a child from home is a very hard decision to take. I have dealt with people who have had the job of deciding whether, because the child might be at risk, a baby has to be removed from the family at birth, and it is a difficult decision. People recognise the enormous emotional stress for the parents of that child, but they feel nevertheless that, for the protection of the child, it is necessary to remove it. But that is not a job that social workers do in a matter-of-fact way. It is a very difficult job, and one must retain some emotional detachment, but frequently the price of that is internal stress. Under the Mental Health Act 1983, it is the social worker who initially decides that a person needs to be taken into residential care for his or her protection. Those decisions involve emotion, and the price of detachment from those emotions is that one internalises them, which is likely to cause internal stress unless one can come to terms with it, and unless the rest of one's life is well regulated.

Importance has been attached to the role of a general social services council. We should look at the extra demands that are placed on social workers as a result of the current system. In a way, the purchaser-provider split is inimical to social services, because one is asking people to do a managerial job. My hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield spoke about that in technical terms, and assessment has a certain technical aspect to it. One is also asking social workers to build up a relationship with clients. It is often not possible to have a completely different person doing the assessment.

Accountancy might be handled at managerial level, but frequently social services managers are not completely absent from their field, and the relationships that are built up between social workers and clients mean that assessment cannot be completely detached from care. That is another distinction between the way in which social work was viewed in the past and the way in which a market forces element has been introduced in aspects of social work.

There is a need for a general social services council. The Minister and the all-party panel on personal social services have had frequent discussions about that, but it is important to move it forward. I hope that the Minister will be able to say that it is moving forward. According to the National Institute for Social Work, a general social services council is needed for the protection of the public, who are entitled to expect high standards from staff who impinge so closely on the quality of their lives; for the protection of employers, who need to know that those they employ meet those standards and are fit to practise; for the protection of staff themselves, who have a right to take a pride in their work and to expect the confidence of the public. I have been talking about that to the Minister and to his predecessor during the whole of my time as a Member of the House. The matter has not been taken forward fast enough. It is time that we were able to offer social workers validation through registration. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say on that. Many social workers are concerned that the role of local authorities, which have an important role to play in social services, is decreasing. They are concerned about the extent to which that is seen as a positive move to transfer the work that local authorities do as a provider to private agencies.

It should be stressed that the bulk of social service provision, including community care, can be provided mainly under the aegis of local authorities. I do not see the local authority as a diminishing provider, and I hope that the Minister agrees, but there is uncertainty in the profession.

I am glad that we have been able to discuss the position of social workers, and I look forward to hearing from the Front Benches.

12 noon

Mr. Alan Milburn (Darlington)

The hon. Member for Mid-Kent (Mr. Rowe) deserves all our thanks for initiating such a sensible, level-headed debate, which has been free of the crisis-ridden atmosphere that all too often dominates our discussions of social work issues.

As the hon. Gentleman pointed out, this is an appropriate time at which to discuss the subject—25 years after the creation of the modern social services department. As he also said, in that quarter of a century the nature of social work has changed dramatically. We now have an opportunity to take stock, to appraise the successes as well as the failures and to plan for the future.

Hon. Members on both sides of the House have drawn attention to the dramatic changes in social services in recent years. Social work has been in the front line of all those changes. Social workers, who are often vilified, provide invaluable services, usually for the most disadvantaged, and sometimes for the most disturbed and disruptive, members of the community. The overwhelming majority of social workers do a good job in very difficult circumstances. Their role requires them to make sensitive decisions within a tight legislative framework and limited budgets, and the legal context in which they operate is becoming ever more complex and demanding.

The ink had barely dried on the Local Authority Social Services Act 1970 before new legislation was being planned. We have had the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 1970, the National Health Service Act 1977, the Mental Health Act 1984, the Registered Homes Act 1984 and the National Health Service and Community Care Act 1990. All those Acts have changed the lives of many people, but they have also placed new and complex responsibilities on the shoulders of social services staff. In particular, they charge social workers with assessing need and commissioning services as well as delivering them.

While every area of social work has been affected by those changes, children's services have inevitably attracted the most public attention. The recent announcement by the Secretary of State for Health of an inquiry into organised child abuse is welcome, provided that it leads to urgent action. My hon. Friend the Member for Morley and Leeds, South (Mr. Gunnell) rightly referred to the need for appropriate safeguards for children in need. Events in Staffordshire some years ago, and the crimes of Frank Beck, demonstrated how abuse can be organised, while Cleveland and Orkney showed how difficult it is to investigate.

Inevitably, the pressures caused by a combination of new legislation and public opinion have led many social work staff to feel that they have moved too far from preventive work. There are no easy yardsticks in child care. As my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Mr. Hinchliffe) pointed out, social workers tend to be damned if they do and damned if they don't, but those who err on the side of caution, and on the side of the child, must surely be in the right.

Unfortunately, life in front-line social work is pretty complex; it is rarely straightforward. Social workers perform statutory duties that have major ramifications for those they help. Although the thrust of the legislation requires them to involve users in decision making, in reality many people are referred to social workers against their will, and securing their co-operation requires considerable skill. Social workers often operate in the context of the courts, and are sometimes caught in a legal minefield.

The onus on staff undertaking assessment for care management, and on those involved in direct care provision, is particularly challenging: the role requires a high level of decision-making ability and personal competence. The social work task is more diverse than it has ever been. Potentially, social workers could be working with all age groups, from babies to the very elderly, in different ethnic communities and in the field and in day and residential settings, dealing with issues ranging from health care to juvenile justice and offering services ranging from family support to legal intervention. The depth and breadth of the tasks with which they must cope is immense.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Morley and Leeds, South pointed out, there is a crisis of morale and stress-related problems in social work. Social work has also been in the front line of the social and economic changes that have confronted Britain during the past two decades. People needing social work help tend to become ever more dependent, which makes the social worker's job ever more difficult. That, too, should come as no surprise. After all, during the past 17 years unemployment and crime have doubled, child poverty has trebled and the poorest in society have seen their real incomes fall. Arguably, our country is now more divided than at any point in this century, and all too often social work has picked up the tab for social division and economic failure.

That situation cannot continue. The country will cease to be able to afford its key public services if our economy is not modernised and our society reunited. Unless we have a society in which young people feel hope again and families once more form the building blocks for stronger communities, our country's caring services will simply be overwhelmed, and social work will be reduced to a firefighting exercise.

Central Government must take the lead. We need an approach that ensures that social work operates in the context of a new national effort to improve opportunity, spread prosperity and strengthen community. Social work needs to take place in an environment where a nationally led anti-poverty strategy seeks to tackle the unemployment, deprivation and sheer lack of hope that have come to dominate too many local communities. The time has come to relieve the pressure on our hard-pressed public services, including social services. That would allow social work to reclaim some of its heritage of family support, rather than sticking to its current role as merely a family crisis agency.

Mr. Rowe

Not all the problems are directly related to poverty. The Trustee Savings bank survey suggests that people between the ages of 15 and 19 spend an average of £14 a week on alcohol.

Mr. Milburn

I have some interest in that issue, as a former chairman of the all-party group on alcohol misuse. But I know from my discussions with social services departments—the hon. Gentleman will have had similar discussions—and with front-line social workers that many of the problems that they confront are a direct product of poverty and deprivation, particularly in inner cities.

I am not just calling for a new policy approach in the Government's tackling of those difficulties; I am also calling for a new spirit of co-operation between Departments in policy making. All too often, the failure to co-ordinate policy in Whitehall produces cracks that cannot be papered over by local services. If social work is to meet the next century's challenges, therefore, a new approach to policy making and new national policies need to be accompanied by something else—the point that the hon. Member for Mid-Kent made about training.

To juggle the often conflicting demands that social workers face, they clearly need to be properly and appropriately trained. The need, however, is not just for the right sort of entry qualifications, but for appropriate in-work training that continually updates skills and knowledge. The most pressing priority is for all social workers to have to demonstrate general competence. Whatever pressures they face, there should be no excuses for incompetence. Service users should be confident that the professionals charged with making important decisions about their lives are working to agreed standards of practice.

Currently, practice is measured against a range of standards, some of which are organisational and some of which are professional. Clarification is needed to ensure consistency and clarity. Standards for services and standards of practice and of conduct for staff should all be related to outcomes for users and for carers.

Despite the heavy responsibilities that social workers bear, there is, as all hon. Members have said, still no statutory body to which social workers and other social care staff are responsible for their standards and conduct. In this sense, social workers are unique compared with their peers in the medical, nursing and health care professions. Labour Members back the creation of a general social services council, precisely to ensure the highest possible standards and conduct among care staff who work with vulnerable people.

Although there is much work to be done to make the proposal a reality—perhaps the Minister will update us on that—and to ensure that it does not make demands on the taxpayer, a general social services council would have enormous benefits. My hon. Friend the Member for Morley and Leeds, South pointed them out. There would be benefits not only to users and employers but to staff. A GSSC would protect staff against people who are incompetent or unfit, and whose activities undermine confidence in the profession.

A general social services council would give the social work profession the status that it deserves, but I do not want to create a new vested interest, divorced from other caring professionals. Social workers have a responsibility to protect the most vulnerable members of society and to promote a better quality of life for people under stress, but they are not alone in that task. We favour a multi-agency approach to service delivery. We want to end unnecessary duplication of effort and, most important, we want the multi-dimensional needs of service users to be reflected in multi-disciplinary working, where professionals from a variety of agencies co-operate for the benefit of the individual. After all, a person with a mental health problem who is living in the community is as likely to need help from a community psychiatric nurse and a local authority housing officer as from a social worker.

All too often, however, multi-disciplinary working is frustrated by the lack of appropriate joint planning of service delivery. In that sense, the confusion in policy making at central Government level finds a ready reflection in what goes on locally. That is why I want local authorities and health authorities to work much more closely together in planning community care and in implementing its delivery.

Such an approach is especially necessary if a "care in the community" approach to mental health policy is to command genuine public confidence. Time and again, in report after report, we have been warned of the fault lines in mental health policy and practice, which can give rise to tragedy. The messages are always the same, particularly the failure to communicate and to co-ordinate. Only better co-operation between health and social care professionals can overcome those problems.

Specifically, urgent action is needed to clarify the relationship between the care management procedures operated by social workers and the care programme approach operated by clinicians. Thought should also be given to improving multiagency training in the health and social care sectors.

The changes that I have outlined—a new national effort to tackle poverty and disadvantage, improved policy co-ordination both nationally and locally, and new standards safeguards—will help to overcome public concerns about social work. They will also help to give a new lease of life to a profession that deserves support for the role that it plays in overcoming social exclusion and in promoting social cohesion. The hon. Member for Mid-Kent and all those who have spoken have done the House and the country a favour in highlighting the importance of the profession, and the changes that are needed to ensure that it flourishes.

12.15 pm
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Mr. John Bowls)

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 the country will be overcome as more authorities, elected members and managers understand the benefits to service users of the best of the independent sector.

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 he 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.

My hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Kent also raised the issue of training. Although the three-year case is yet to be proven, I accept his point about the need to examine post-qualifying education to discover whether we can ensure that it is adequate to keep people up to date and to achieve the right combination of academic and practical training. We will certainly consider what he said, and I shall discuss it with him on a future occasion.

This has been an interesting and useful debate. Social workers will continue to have a key role in delivering services to vulnerable people. We owe it to them and to those whom they serve to do all that we can to help them perform that role effectively. That is the best way to ensure that people working in social work deserve and achieve the public respect and standing that comes from an often difficult and challenging job that is well done.