HL Deb 17 February 1960 vol 221 cc73-91

2.49 p.m.

THE EARL OF FEVERSHAM rose to call attention to the Report of the Working Party on Social Workers in Local Authority Health and Welfare Services; and to move for Papers. The noble Earl said: My Lords, I beg to move the Motion which stands in my name on the Order Paper. The Working Party on Social Workers in Local Authority Health and Welfare Services was appointed in June, 1955, and published its Report last year. Those of your Lordships who have read the Report will no doubt agree with me that it contains not only far-reaching recommendations, but also a fund of most important detail which will be of the greatest value to many engaged in the social services. The Chairman, Dr. Eileen Younghusband, and the members of her Committee have received congratulations both from public bodies and from many others engaged in social work. I am sure that I am voicing the opinion of your Lordships' House when I say that we should wish to add to those congratulations and commend the untiring and public-spirited work which this Report represents.

It is now nearly five years since the Working Party was appointed and nearly a year since it published its Report. I realise that some of the implications of the Report are so far-reaching that Her Majesty's Government will want to have the opinions of a great number of bodies, including that of your Lordships' House. For that reason the noble Baroness, Lady Elliot of Harwood, and I have thought it wise to raise the subject matter of the Report in your Lordships' House to-day, and we hope that Her Majesty's Government will take the opportunity to announce their reactions to the Report, and that the noble Lord who is to reply on behalf of the Government will indicate that there will be no delay in implementing certain of its recommendations.

An announcement of the intentions of Her Majesty's Government on this Report is important for several reasons. Local authorities inherited many of the functions of the Welfare State when the National Health Service and National Assistance Acts were passed. Services which for 150 years had been primarily the responsibility of voluntary bodies are now a social responsibility of the State, although, of course, voluntary bodies still have an important and, indeed, a leading rôle to play. But the passing of Acts of Parliament does not make the services work, nor does it provide the personal relationships which are at the heart of social work. The lack of training and lack of status during the last fourteen years since the passing of the National Health Service Act has dissuaded many potential recruits from joining services which have little to offer except heavy case-loads, poor promotion prospects, low salaries and, I think, a sense of inferiority when working alongside others who are professionally qualified.

Those who have attacked the Report put their objection in this way: "We do not want a great horde of social workers 'snooping' into other people's lives." I believe that they have missed the main point. We should never dream of having schools without teachers, or hospitals without nurses; and we should never dream of having teachers or nurses without training. This Report provides an answer by suggesting that in the future there should be two types of social workers—the generally trained and the professionally trained—supplemented by the help of welfare assistants who, though not termed "social workers", would provide recruits for the qualified status.

These recommendations apply to the Services to which the Younghusband Committee was confined by its terms of reference, but many of those recommendations could equally apply to a very much wider field. The Committee's inquiries covered a very wide field of social work—health centres, the care of expectant mothers, unmarried mothers and young children, after-care of tuberculosis and V.D. patients, the Mental Welfare Service and the Home Help Service, all of which came under the provisions of the National Health Service Act, 1946. But the Committee also inquired into services which came under the provisions of the National Assistance Act, 1948, including the care of the elderly, the blind, the deaf and many other classes of handicapped people. All this means that the Committee investigated services which are designed to assist many thousands of people within the community.

Some feel that the scope of this inquiry should have been much wider, and that it should have included the Probation Service, the Psychiatric Social Service, health visitors and voluntary bodies. I do not agree with that view, but I believe that it may be necessary to have another inquiry, with broader terms of reference, after certain of these recommendations have been implemented and put to the test. The service of health visitors, as many of your Lordships will know, has already been the subject of a separate Report, and I think it is relevant to say that the Younghusband Report recognises that this service is complementary to many of the recommendations which they incorporate in this Report.

The immediate reaction of social workers to the Younghusband Report is, I believe, one of awe that such a stupendous task has been accomplished. A second reaction is primarily one of relief that at last an attempt has been made to co-ordinate the set-up in order to achieve three main objects. The first is to produce the most effective service for the individual in need. The second is to ensure a more economic use of social workers, and the third is to work out the best form of training for those social workers undertaking the various jobs. To-day we have the position that those who are actually doing the work are saying that they are not adequately equipped. They ask, "Please may we have some training so that we can do our work better?" The Secretary of the Institute of Social Welfare has written to me saying: Social workers have been deeply conscious of their limitations in what has rapidly become a skilled profession, due to the lack of facilities for training. We recognise the need for thorough training in social work, and applaud the Working Party's aims.

I believe it is true that the need for training has become increasingly acute, for a number of reasons. First, unless training and status are given we simply shall not get any recruits to staff the service. One might ask—in fact, numbers of people do ask—whether training and qualifications are necessary in social work in which one person helps another. I would suggest that the simple short answer is that in this modern world either we shall have to have trained workers or we shall have none. Secondly, the need for training is acute because of the quick expansion of duties imposed on local authorities to look after a very wide range of handicapped people; and, thirdly, the Minister, by regulations under the Mental Health Act, has imposed upon local authorities a duty to produce schemes for community care by April next. The fourth and last reason is the need to look after the ever-increasing number of elderly people. My Lords, those are the four main reasons, as I interpret it, which justify training.

What does social work training mean? Basically, as I interpret it, it means that the experience of many years is sifted, distilled and moulded into a course of instruction. Since my day as a social worker it has been discovered that there are certain underlying principles which run through all forms of social work; and to acquire the skill to practise these principles is a gradual and difficult task. In this field, as in any other, the knowledge gained through experience can be passed on to other workers. Training avoids the costly and often lengthy business of a social worker's learning from his own experience and by his own mistakes. And so, as knowledge has been accumulated, it has been recognised that social work is a subject that can be taught and learnt, though it can be done well only by those who have been trained in practical experience and by those with a suitable personality and with a real wish to help others who are in trouble.

My Lords, it has been suggested that because the social worker uses knowledge and theory about human behaviour which is largely derived from sociology and psychiatry, he has pretentions to being "the poor man's psychiatrist". The noble Baroness opposite, Lady Wootton of Abinger, who I am very glad to see is to intervene in this debate, has made this kind of criticism, and I think she has recently supported her argument by quoting Virginia Woolf, who vividly describes such people as being tainted with … the peculiar repulsiveness of those who dabble their fingers self-approvingly in the stuff of other people's souls. Although I, like many of your Lordships, have always been particularly sensitive to the interference by others in the private lives of individuals—and I agree that we must insist that this is in no circumstances done unnecessarily—I nevertheless believe that social workers who are trained do none other than protect, befriend and advise those who require help. I am told by my social-worker friends—and I think the Report bears this out—that the claims on them to help and understand those in need are more concerned with the neighbours and with the family life than with the particular trouble or disability from which the particular individual is suffering.

In deciding the kind of training that is required the Younghusband Committee made so hold as to classify three needs of those who use the services: those with straightforward problems requiring a simple service; those with more complex problems requiring systematic and continued help, and those with special or exceptional difficulty requiring the best skilled assistance available. The National Council of Social Service, the London County Council and many other bodies, so far as I can ascertain, agree that these divisions correspond with experience and that they are applicable to the personal problems of many who seek help. If it is proved, as many of the people who write to me indicate, that this division of needs and problems exists, it seems to me to justify the future scheme for training as envisaged in this Report.

My Lords, perhaps I may now be permitted to say a word on the pattern of training. Much routine work, says the Committee, could be undertaken by "welfare assistants" who would be prepared for their work by a minimum of systematic "training in-service", and they would work under the supervision of other social workers. They propose a second kind of training, a basic social work training; and this would involve a two-year full-time course, including the necessary field work practice. The third grade requires professionally trained workers, which incorporates university or an equivalent degree; and those in this grade would be used for undertaking case work of exceptional difficulty and for the guidance and supervision of other social workers. The importance of these proposals can be set against the fact that 89 per cent. of the present officers have no qualification whatsoever in social science or professional social work. These three levels of need and staff are generally approved by social workers and the organisations that represent them, so far as I can ascertain. The majority of social workers say that, in whatever field they are required to specialise—and it is certain that in many fields specialisation is necessary—they should have a basic general work training.

There may be an impression—though it is quite incorrect—that the Working Party is proposing to enlist a whole new army of social workers. The total number of workers at present employed by the local authorities in these services is around 3,000. In the next ten years the figure would be raised to 5,000. Nor does the Report suggest that any other workers of long experience should be thrown out of their occupations. Your Lordships who have read the Report will see that special recommendations are included to provide that these workers should be helped over the transition period with refresher courses and other means of making them well aware of the new developments. It is suggested that many of these experienced workers will, in fact, act as key instructors in "field work training", practical training.

The National Council of Social Service stress two points. They say that if it is accepted that there should be a general basic training for all social workers there should also be grants for similar training for those volunteer workers who work for voluntary agencies. They also say that any training schemes which may be established by the proposed National Council for Social Work Training should include representatives of voluntary bodies. If your Lordships reflect on what happens to-day you will realise that a vast amount of work of the Welfare State is undertaken through the agency of voluntary bodies. This is a very big subject in itself: a whole chapter of the Report has been devoted to it. I am therefore very glad to find that the noble Baroness, Lady Swanborough, who has great experience of this aspect of the subject, is to speak this afternoon.

I do not want to detain your Lordships for too long, but may I now turn to, and underline, the urgent need for trained mental welfare officers? This subject has been fully stressed in the Report before us. In this field, particularly, schemes of training are long overdue. General progress in mental health has been arrested, and will continue to be arrested if training is not given. Those of us who took part in the debates on the Mental Health Act know that that Act puts heavy and inescapable responsibility on community care. Underlying the whole Act, as with the Report of the Royal Commission on which the Act was based, is the idea that patients suffering from mental disorder shall be helped within the community rather than in a hospital, if that can be done; and the idea of shifting the responsibility and emphasis from hospital care to community care is one of the great themes of our new legislation. The Royal Commission's Report started from the premise that many patients are being cared for in hospitals to-day for no better reason than that no other facilities, or no adequate facilities, exist to look after them elsewhere; and that proper community services, if they were provided, would avoid many people being in-patients at all.

As I have said, local authorities now have to prepare schemes for these community services, and obviously these services cannot work unless there are social workers who have special knowledge and skill. This is a fact well recognised by the Working Party, and the Report emphatically states that the mental welfare officer should take a general social work training course, but with special emphasis on mental health. Many of the public have been alarmed by the idea that the Mental Health Act will throw on to the community a large number of mentally disordered people who need special care. The only way to reassure them is to provide a social work service—a service to which they can turn in the knowledge that effective help will be given.

My Lords, this is not a new idea. It has been recommended by a number of Committees, including the Committee which bore my name, which was convened nearly 25 years ago. In paragraph 526 of the Report of that Committee, entitled, Voluntary Mental Health Services, we said: There is an urgent need for greatly increased training facilities for social workers, and others who are concerned in their daily duties with Mental Health". Also, I regret that what we then said, nearly a quarter of a century ago, is still true—that is: We find that a complete and fully coordinated mental welfare service is rare. In most areas … there is a lack of unification and each department runs in its own groove". Although in those days the climate of opinion was such that one did not command a measure of public support, to-day things are very different. We have waited and waited for the Government of the day to get hold of this problem, yet there is still no training except that provided by my own association, which is limited to refresher courses. And to-day nearly half of the mental welfare offices are over 50 years of age, and 40 per cent. are due to retire within the next ten years.

Two years ago, almost to the day, I raised these questions in a Motion in your Lordships' House on the Report of the Royal Commission on the Law Relating to Mental Illness, and my noble and learned friend on the Woolsack, whom I am very glad to see in his place to-day, said then [OFFICIAL REPORT, Vol. 207. col. 848]: … the decisions on the future training of mental welfare officers should await the Report of the Younghusband Committee. The noble and learned Viscount said then that miracles by way of increases of staff could not be expected overnight, but that he did not want that to sound like a note of postponement. He added that it was an exhilarating and challenging time, and that the Government were determined to face the problems which it presented and, in consultation with local authorities, to make the maximum progress that resources allowed.

My Lords, a start must be made now. We cannot afford to wait further. My experience, for what it is worth, is that local government, if given the incentive and the lead, will implement any recommendations that come from the Government of the day. I do not want to be pessimistic; I do not want to sound a note of alarm. But unless the Government take the lead, and take steps to fill the appalling gaps in these services, there will be a spate of sensational incidents, perhaps involving violence and perhaps involving children. We can expect hands to be raised in horror, and widespread appeals for people to be locked up in more and in bigger institutions. When we see these things headlined in our newspapers we may ask: who is to blame? Certainly not the newspapers for exposing gaps in services which are the responsibility of local authorities. The big question is this: is the country going to accept wholeheartedly that people who are handicapped should be integrated, as far as possible, into normal life, following normal pursuits, and should have the chance of normal happiness? That way seems to me to follow most closely our idea of the Christian ethic. Or is the country going to be forced, by an administrative breakdown or by an unintelligent approach, into reactionary or retrogressive steps, and into saying: "Because there may be trouble, these people should be locked up until the end of their days?"

The Report of the Albemarle Committee, published only recently, censured the Ministry of Education for failure adequately to assist the youth services, with the obvious inference that such failure might have played its part in the increase in juvenile delinquency. I hope that similar censure will not fall on my right honourable friend the Minister of Health for not taking action to fill in these wide gaps in an otherwise comprehensive and enlightened service. My Lords, nothing can be worse than to do nothing. The Government must undertake to meet the needs outlined in this section of the Younghusband Report: and the question is: how long do we have to wait for a start to be made? I beg to move for Papers.

3.19 p.m.

LORD PAKENHAM

My Lords, I was not present in the House the other day when those fine tributes were paid to the late Sir Charles Hendriks. Before coming to the Motion I cannot refrain from adding my own small tribute to one who was such a great friend to so many of us and so vastly helpful to all.

I feel that the noble Earl, Lord Feversham, has rendered a most important service in bringing forward this debate; and he has spoken, as I knew he would, in a very wise and knowledgeable way, and also, particularly at the end, in a very formidable way. I know that the noble Earl is a kindly man, but he is the sort of man I should not welcome to have up against me if I were a Minister—and I can pay an independent Peer, if I may so describe him, no higher tribute than that. I feel sure that what the noble Earl has said, particularly at the end of his speech, will be noted very carefully by Her Majesty's advisers. He has paid tribute to the Younghusband Report and those responsible for it, and I certainly join with him there. He has said that the wide-spread feeling about the Report among those who have read it is one of awe. No doubt that is so, but it would take more than a Report to awe my noble friend Lady Wootton of Abinger. I should like to see the Government Report that would cow her spirit! And, of course, she has (if I may use a colloquialism) given this Report "stick" in no uncertain terms. As to this, your Lordships will be able to judge when we hear from my noble friend later. She has begun by saying, "Is this verbosity really necessary?", pointing to the fact that the Report runs to 328 pages. Last year, the noble Baroness delivered herself in 339 valuable pages—

BARONESS WOOTTON OF ABINGER

My Lords, the noble Lord will forgive me if I point out that the range of topics I dealt with is a great deal wider than the provision of training for social workers in a limited field—namely, the health and welfare services of local authorities and the National Assistance Board.

LORD PAKENHAM

That is so profoundly true that I was about to say it. But I was also going to say that I shared her feeling at the end, that perhaps we could have done without 100 pages of the Younghusband Report and added 100 pages to the book of the noble Baroness.

In speaking first for my Party this afternoon, my task is perhaps just to this extent delicate: that though we have been studying this Report, the Labour Party have not reached the stage—and I do not know whether any other Party has—of coming out with a Party line. Therefore, what I say will not command any greater authority intrinsically than anything that is said by other more attractive speakers later, but I do record the conviction that my general approach will prove to be broadly in line with the thinking of my Party in the most essential respects.

It has been explained by the noble Earl, Lord Feversham—and the noble Earl and others will forgive me if I repeat, rather less gracefully, one or two of the things he has said—that the Report is concerned with the social workers employed by local authorities in their health and their welfare departments under the National Health and National Assistance Acts. As my noble friend Lady Wootton of Abinger says, it is a limited field. Here, and almost only here, I would disagree with the noble Earl. I am sorry that the terms of reference of the inquiry of the Younghusband Committee were not wider. I believe that, at the end, we are left with a considerable job of co-ordination between the arrangements for these social workers and other social workers, and I cannot help thinking that if those concerned had gone a little farther afield they would have covered a wider area of social work for the purpose of this inquiry. But that is not the fault of the Younghusband Committee. The blame, if any, is to be attached to those who drew up the terms of reference.

There are about 3,300 people concerned in these services, only a small proportion of the total social workers engaged in work for local authorities or voluntary bodies in this country. On the assumptions of the Younghusband Report, there will be about twice that number when their scheme is complete. Like the noble Earl, but without his special authority, I have been very much involved these days in the mental health field and I am thoroughly with him in taking a particular interest in that side of the work. Of the 3,300 covered by the Younghusband inquiry, about 1,100 are workers under the mental health service. Under the Younghusband plan, their number will be rather more than doubled. I feel sure that I am speaking for the Labour Party as a whole when I say that we welcome the general trend of legislation and administration which has called for this great increase in the number of social workers in this field, and in mental health in particular. Indeed, many of the Acts in question were passed by our own Government during the 1945–50 period. Since then, as the noble Earl explained, professional opinion has moved even further in the direction of preferring community care wherever possible to care within institutions. That, of course, is the emphasis of the new Mental Health Act, to which we devoted so much attention last summer.

Since the Younghusband Report was published, the Act itself and the Minister's subsequent circular have greatly extended the local authorities' duties in this field. We in the Labour Party, as your Lordships will recall, have been well to the fore in advocating these developments. Indeed, we divided your Lordships' House on the Mental Health Bill in urging that the duties of community care should be compulsory on local authorities. Although the noble Earl did not go into the Lobby with us, he indicated that he felt a great deal of sympathy with the position we were adopting. Those who welcome the additional functions must welcome and help to provide and encourage the additional supply of social workers. May I quote Professor Titmuss in the Social Service Quarterly for Autumn, 1959? Curiously enough, the first two sentences of this quotation were used (I am bound to say in a friendly way) by the noble Earl without acknowledgment, but perhaps Professor Titmuss borrowed them from the noble Earl. At any rate, we shall see. What Professor Titmuss said was this: Those who have attacked the report with the cry 'We don't want all these social workers snooping into other people's lives' have missed the point. They would not dream of demanding more education and more schools and yet call for fewer teachers. That is what the noble Earl said. Perhaps Professor Titmuss and he came to say the same thing by a process of telepathy or perhaps the professor borrowed from the noble Earl.

THE EARL OF FEVERSHAM

My Lords, I think it is quite clear to all your Lordships that I borrowed from Professor Titmuss and ought to have given recognition to that fact.

LORD PAKENHAM

My Lords, I hope the noble Lord will forgive my point. Professor Titmuss continued: To be consistent, therefore, they should oppose all the progressive and preventive aspects of mental health, child care and welfare legislation and call instead for more and bigger institutions, hospitals and Luxborough Lodges. May I quote further, to give some Party backing to these views, which might otherwise be mistaken for being personal. I quote from the official pamphlet setting out the Labour Party's policy for health and entitled Members One of Another. No doubt it is familiar to your Lordships. I hear it rumoured that my noble friend Lord Taylor had a great hand in that. It is not quite the thing to reveal that, but I should like to think it is true, because it is a memorable document. I quote: There must be a substantial expansion of the services provided by the local health authorities. So there is no doubt at all where the Labour Party stand about the expansion of the services and, in a general way, no doubt where they stand about the number of staff required. We are told, in the same document, that Labour proposes … the establishment of a Local Authority Social Worker Service, to work in conjunction with the hospitals to meet the special needs of the old, the chronic sick, and those with mental and nervous illnesses. The pamphlet goes on to say that … new training facilities will be needed. When my noble friend Lord Taylor winds up, I hope he will feel able to endorse what is said so well in that pamphlet, with which his name has been so widely and honourably associated. He wrote it?—well, I thought so.

Before I come to training, may I point out that it is not only the increase of functions which will increase the need for staff? The Younghusband Report makes it clear that there is a national shortage of such workers at present and that recruitment is considered inadequate even for existing needs. It also makes it clear, as the noble Earl explained, that this shortage even apart from increased functions, will be answered in the next few years by the retirement of staff with Poor Law experience who have held appointments as welfare officers and duly authorised officers since 1948. The most important emphasis of the Report (and here I am sure that 99 out of 100 of my colleagues in the Labour Party would agree; and I should hope that 100 out of 100 might agree) is the overwhelming need for more social workers. I reiterate that point to-day with all the strength at my command, and I beg of the noble Lord, Lord St. Oswald, who I am pleased to see is to reply to the debate, that urgent attention be given to the recruitment of new entrants to all levels of the service.

Then we come to the question of how this is to be achieved. It is obvious from the Report that our social workers in the categories in question, indeed, in all categories, are seriously underpaid. We are naturally interested in these topics, irrespective of any Party consideration, and I feel that we can all unite in the conviction that nothing much will happen until this mean attitude—for which we must all, I suppose, as a nation take some responsibility—towards our social workers is supplanted by one which is one more generous and more prudent. But from the point of view of the quantity, and still more of quality, of the staff, the present arrangements for training, in so far as they exist, must be transformed out of recognition.

We are told that 89 per cent. of all social workers in the categories we are discussing have no qualifications in social science or professional social work. Duly authorised officers, for example, have no officially recognised qualification or course of training, and when we remind ourselves (the noble Earl, Lord Feversham, gave figures of certain sections) that, taking these categories as a whole, more than 40 per cent. are over 50, the problem of turning this staff into a well-organised profession assumes its true magnitude. Nevertheless, this task must be undertaken if we are to do more than pay lip service to the social ideals which so many of us have so often proclaimed from the housetops. I should hope that all that will be common ground.

When we embark on the question of what form the training should take we are bound to plunge into controversy—I do not see how it could be otherwise—in the sense that one can hardly expect anybody to agree in every detail with any of his friends exactly how these various categories of persons ought to be trained. The ten members of the Younghusband Committee did at least reach a series of unanimous conclusions; and seeing that some plan must ultimately be agreed upon if we are to act at all, their particular proposals have, obviously, very high standing. That does not mean that the members of the Younghusband Committee would wish to claim, or that we should concede to them, a Divine insight. As has already been explained, their blueprint would provide for three types of workers: first of all, there would be social workers, like those already trained in the universities, from whom it would be reasonable to expect much of the leadership and training of the others. Secondly, there would be social workers trained outside the universities in courses organised by colleges of further education leading to a certificate of National Social Work; and then there would be welfare assistants, who might usually be young recruits and would be able to carry out simple functions as a preliminary stage to further training. In the meantime, the Committee recommend that officers over 50 or with fifteen years' experience should be recognised as qualified by experience and should be encouraged to take refresher courses.

Put in this highly generalised way—university trained people; the people with the national certificate and then the assistants, or, if we can so call them, the apprentices, who would not be qualified—the proposals of the Committee seem to be not only unexceptionable but fairly obvious, once we concede the need to turn this haphazard occupation into a co-ordinated profession. There are, however, many points, some small and some not so small, where total agreement is hardly possible.

To take one objection of my own—and I will raise only one or two of my own, because I am anxious to place myself behind the Report—I personally am far from agreeing that if an undergraduate wishes to embark on social work—it might be one of our own children, for example—as a career, he should necessarily take a social science course at the university, meaning, I gather, either a degree in social science at the university or, at any rate, a two-year course there. I should think that someone who had done history or the law, to take those examples, should qualify as a social worker so long as he took some kind of social service diploma afterwards. But I do not agree with the idea that the top-level social worker must be someone who has been trained in social science—and I am glad to see the noble Earl, Lord Woolton, who has had as wide an experience as anyone of this, nodding in sympathy with me.

THE EARL OF WOOLTON

I entirely agree.

LORD PAKENHAM

I feel that I am entitled to speak about this matter. I am trained in social science myself, if the real social scientists will allow that title to the modern course at Oxford in the 1920's, and I have taught at social science faculties for a number of years. Therefore I am not at all prejudiced against social science. But I feel that the Committee are wrong on this matter, and I hope that the Government may take the same view. No doubt I could pick on other points of difference, as we all could. More fundamentally, I would sympathise with critics who are unhappy about the dogmatic relationship between the three categories of need and the three different grades of social workers. It may well be that my noble friends Baroness Wootton of Abinger and Lord Taylor, and others, will pursue this point further, and I will certainly join them in denouncing any undue rigidity.

One of the main issues—and here I am in agreement with the Committee—with regard to the proposals on training is the recommendation that the central core of training should be the same for all these "middle grade" workers, who will be the bulk of the service. As the noble Earl, Lord Feversham, explained, they emphasise the importance of teaching on the problems of human behaviour and understanding of family life as an essential preliminary to being able to help with specific handicaps like mental illness, blindness, deafness and so on. I am sure that this effort to treat the individual person who is being looked after as a whole rather than someone possessed of one or more handicaps is entirely progressive and salutary and should be supported. The Report recognises that specialisation will still be necessary, especially in the mental field, but the Committee are particularly concerned that local authorities should establish comprehensive services for both the mentally ill and the mentally defective, and also that there should be close co-operation and planning between the hospitals and local authorities to ensure continuity of care for the patient when he goes into hospital or when he leaves.

All this, in a general way, seems to me very sound and good. But what is it, then, which generates so much heat when this subject comes to be discussed? It is, I think, the issue of whether there is such a person as a professionally qualified social worker, as distinct from someone engaged in social work of good sense and ripe experience. Is the concept of a professionally qualified social worker a real one? That, I should have thought, is an issue about which we certainly ought to hear a good deal this afternoon. My own answer to that question would be "Yes". There is, however, a slightly different question to which I would not give that answer. It may be asked: can a qualification in social work be put on the same footing as a qualification in medicine, law, theology or accountancy, for example? My answer there would be "No". But I would find an analogy (I do not know whether this occurs in the Report I have not been able to find it) between training as a social worker and training as a teacher.

As many of us know, having taught and been taught in the field where there were no qualifications except degrees, but where there was no teaching qualification attached, it is possible to operate both in teaching and in social work without undergoing a course of training. I suppose that many Members of this House have done social work without training, and have taught and been taught without training; and they may have been practised on by social workers who have not been trained. One cannot say that anyone who has not been through a course of social training is incapable of doing any valuable social work at all. I would press the analogy there with teaching. Other things being equal, it seems to me that both in teaching and social work the trained person will be better, and usually a good deal better, than the untrained person. That is as far as I should like to take the matter.

There is yet another issue mixed up with this. To what extent is a study of psychiatry at various levels likely to prove of benefit to social training and social work? I suppose I am as fully conscious as others of the absurdity of some of the claims made for psychiatry by some of its adherents, but if I am forced to take sides, either for or against psychiatrists and psychiatric social workers, I pay a fervent tribute to the work of these ladies and gentlemen in the cause of mercy and healing. If there is any Member of your Lordships' House who is absolutely convinced that in no circumstances would he ever benefit himself from psychiatric help, I would say that he is probably in greater need than any other Member of the House at this moment.

My Lords, I did not rise this afternoon to involve myself in these deep and intricate matters. I did so to urge on the Government, and, I think I can fairly say, to urge on the Government on behalf of the Party to which I belong, the need to make adequate plans in the spirit of the Younghusband Committee for the supply and training of far more social workers in these vital services, and to submit that there should not be a moment's delay in setting up the suggested National Council for Social Work Training. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord St Oswald, will deal with the question of the National Council when he replies. Even if it is set up, it will be some years before we can see the fruits, and that is an extra reason why we should implement this central and generally accepted principle of the Report, not at some distant date but now. Within this proposed Council the best available solutions of any of these problems which we shall be discussing to-day are likely to be discovered, but until the Council is established we shall be failing to perform a duty which we have no excuses any longer for overlooking.

Earlier this afternoon a noble Lord on my own Benches who has great experience of social work said to me that what matters more than the money and training in social work is the spirit of dedication; and that I entirely accept. At the same time, he also, I am sure, would agree with me—and we shall all be in agreement with this—that you can spoil the finest spirit if you try it too high. As has been said, too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. It is up to us, we in public life, to decide whether we are going to encourage or discourage the spirit of dedication in the social services, and I implore the noble Lord on behalf of the Government to give us and the country a positive encouragement this afternoon.