News

It may be advisable to print this document as it is long.

To help it recruit and retain staff, a London borough whose social services department is on special measures is resorting to a pay system that has been found wanting elsewhere. Anabel Unity Sale gauges its chances of success.

It is appraisal time again. But instead of the usual rigmarole about whether reviews are handled correctly or the phone answered with enough zing, your line manager may have a proposal. Meet a few agreed targets, and you'll get a pay rise.

Cynics may greet the prospect of performance-related pay (PRP) for social work with scepticism. But for Newham Council's 300 social workers, including those at team manager level, it is to become a reality.

The east London borough is planning to introduce a new pay scheme from this October, whereby all social workers who get satisfactory appraisals and meet performance targets receive an annual bonus of £1,500 from April 2002.

It is a controversial decision by Newham, whose social services department has been under special measures since February. PRP is one of several measures discussed in a report by the council's cabinet committee on recruitment and retention strategy for social services. It concludes that social workers' pay in Newham has "fallen behind the market rate for this type of work".

But won't there be problems between social workers who get the bonus and those who don't? Not according to Kathryn Hudson, Newham's director of social services. She says: "This approach to PRP is not divisive because it enables all social workers to be paid the bonus if their work is assessed as satisfactory."

She is also keen to iron out any hitches PRP may involve. She says: "We are prepared to be flexible and to adapt and learn as we go along."

But the introduction of PRP is opposed by Newham Unison branch chairperson Michael Gavan. He says: "The system has so many possibilities for unfairness and inequalities. It only needs a situation where the manager doesn't get on with a member of staff, and all of a sudden the additional payment that was rightfully theirs is withheld."

For those social workers who do not get their annual bonus, Gavan says Unison is setting up an appeals procedure that is "robust, fair and transparent". He adds: "This is a warning to the council that if it messes our members about, we are prepared to take industrial action."

He doubts that Newham's PRP scheme will be successful. "I think PRP will disappear and become an annual bonus, which is how it should be," he says.

Association of Directors of Social Services senior vice president Mike Leadbetter says he disagrees with PRP both "professionally and personally".

He says: "I am unconvinced of its value. There are other and more appropriate incentives for staff than PRP. People want things such as adequate training, a decent working culture and the opportunity to progress."

PRP, he says, does not work well in environments where teamwork is necessary. "All of us depend on our teams to deliver the goods. The concept of setting targets and, when they are achieved, rewarding one person - when the whole team helped achieve them - does not work. It just does not make sense."

Leadbetter speaks from personal experience. Essex Council, where he has been director of social services since 1993, used PRP when he first joined the authority. He actively campaigned to have PRP scrapped "because I thought it was divisive", and in 1997 the system was brought to an end.

Other councils, he says, are not likely to adopt the Newham approach to pay. "Evidence about what keeps staff is that pay is important, but is not the only important thing."

Ian Johnston, director of the British Association of Social Workers, is also critical of tying pay to performance.

He says such a system may lead a council's social services department to focus on outcomes - so social workers hit their targets - rather than on preventive work. "It is a perverse incentive to focus on the wrong things. This may push a council further down the line where they respond to crises rather than do preventive work," he explains. And he warns: "Social workers may be rewarded for saving money rather than spending it."

Johnston says BASW would prefer to see higher salaries paid to social workers across the board "to reflect the complex and demanding nature of their jobs".

Social workers are not the only ones unhappy with PRP. Those working in the NHS dropped PRP in the 1990s "like a hot potato" according to John Northrop, director of the NHS body Pay and Workforce Research. He says: "Most people, particularly people in the NHS, are risk-averse and do not like a high proportion of their income being variable."

He says the concept of people needing an incentive to work is irrelevant to nurses and social workers: "It seems obvious to me that people in the NHS, or the public sector, do not work in it for the money."

Northrop agrees with Leadbetter that PRP has potentially "divisive" effects in the workplace. He says: "It is difficult to get people to work effectively as a team if you are paying them different amounts of money. If staff are on PRP, they may not want to help their colleagues if it means they are not going to meet their own targets."

While Newham Council maintains PRP is the way forward, others from inside and outside the sector believe it is not. But whether the borough's social workers will themselves embrace PRP remains to be seen.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Stress at work is a recognised problem and many employers have strategies to deal with it. But a recent case illustrates how recruitment and retention problems, coupled with management regimes that fail to act on stress, could lead to more court appearances for social work managers. Alex Dobson reports.

For four years Thelma Conway struggled to get someone to heed her warnings that her job was undermining her health and wrecking her life. Nobody, she says, would listen and as a result she suffered a stress-related illness.

Last week she was awarded an out-of-court settlement of £140,000. Her employers, Worcestershire Council, admitted liability and publicly apologised for the harm done to her and her family.

Conway is the latest of several social workers and other public sector employees who have sought and gained compensation for stress at work. Pay-outs for stress-related illness are now estimated to be costing employers in the UK around £5 billion every year.

Although Conway was an experienced social worker with more than 20 years of coping with the demands of a difficult job, she says she eventually found herself in an impossible situation. She and her union, Unison, say that her experiences show how employers are still failing to heed the warning signs.

She began working in a residential home for people with learning difficulties in Redditch in 1994. "I had only been working there for about one month and there were problems in the home,'' she says.

"There were poor management practices in operation and the manager was suspended and eventually left. I was working as the deputy officer in charge, which meant that I was working as a deputy manager.

"Of course once the manager was suspended, there were people coming in to fill as temporaries, working as acting officers in charge. Basically they were just there to make sure the place ticked over. I just carried on working, although it was very difficult and then I finally asked my line manager when we were going to have an officer in charge, and he replied, 'You are the officer in charge'. I was not trained to be a manager, and I did not have enough back-up.

"After that the stress of the job just builds up. It just creeps up on you. There isn't one day when you think you can't actually cope, but the pressure keeps building up all the time. Eventually you come to the point where you can't go on any more. I was unable to sleep, I had awful mood swings. It was the worst time of my life and it affected every aspect of my life, my children, my marriage and even my grandchildren, because my life was being destroyed by the stress I was under.

"I was working about an 80-hour week, and I was struggling because I had not been given any extra training. I kept saying that I could not cope and that I desperately needed someone to listen to me. In April 1997 I went off sick for a month with stress and when I went back I was told that I would get all the help and support that was out there, all the training that was needed for me and the staff.

"But it just never materialised even though the County Inspectorate reported that the home needed a competent manager. I was not competent enough to do the job. I was employed as a deputy and not a manager. I struggled on but it was intolerable and I became ill.

"It was the worst four years I've ever lived through. It could have been avoided if someone had simply listened. I kept telling everyone that I was struggling and I felt I was letting people down. Normally I am a very confident bubbly person but stress destroyed a lot of things in my life. It still upsets me when I think about what it has done to myself and my family."

Conway's experiences are similar to those in many other public sector cases where employees have sought compensation for the stresses at work. In most of these cases, the individuals involved had hitherto had long and successful working lives.

Simon Dewsbury of Thompson's solicitors, which act for Unison and were the solicitors for Conway and other cases such as Ingram, Lancaster and Walker, says: "The majority of cases that succeed are those where an employee has told their employer of the stress that they have suffered and have had to take time off work because of the stress. They then return and the stress has remained the same. The crucial point is that the employers knew - or should have known - that there was a problem, and failed to deal with it.

"If you can show that the way that the job was set up means that stress is foreseeable, you could then show that there was a breach of health and safety law. It would need to be in situations where the risk of stress was such that it was reasonable to take preventive measures."

Ian Johnston of the British Association of Social Workers says that although there is now more recognition of stress in social work, there are still too many examples of bad management practice.

"The situation has not improved in the way that it should have in relation to staff well-being, although there is greater recognition now about the situation that social workers face and how bad it can be,'' he says.

"But there are still too many bad management practices that allow employees to be left struggling and feeling that they are complaining and inadequate if they try to draw attention to what is happening. There is not enough recognition that people need help and support in different situations.

"As social workers we know about human beings and how they can react to situations and we should be able to help. There is a very serious issue in this country in the way that the work ethic demands unrealistic deadlines and forces people to pretend that they can cope with situations that are out of their control.

"We need to acknowledge that often we are just papering over the cracks and putting people in impossible situations. One of the measures that we would like to see is the Department of Health issuing minimum staffing levels. But they won't do that. If they really care about standards then why not do that? Why should somebody be expected to cope if their colleague is off sick, when they are already under pressure and struggling?

"That is happening day in day out, and with the acute shortage of workers it is something that is going to go on.''

A spokesperson for Worcestershire Council said that they had no comment to make other than that they had admitted liability in the Conway case.

Dewsbury points out that there is an increasing duty on employers to be proactive and to make assessments, including evaluating the risk of stress. They have been required to do that for the last five years.

Many who have been involved in high-profile stress cases see something of an irony in the apparent inability of social work to assess risks faced by its own staff. Managers expect social workers to assess risks faced by clients on a daily, hourly basis, but it seems that too often they themselves are unable to identify the unhealthy stresses and strains borne by their own staff.

Landmark stress cases

John Walker (1994)

Made legal history when he became the first person to show that his employers were liable for the stress he had suffered while working as a senior social worker for Northumberland Council. As his caseload became increasingly heavy he repeatedly asked for extra staff and more administrative back-up. His requests were refused. He suffered a nervous breakdown and was off work for five months. When he returned to work, his workload had not been reduced and he later suffered a second breakdown and he retired on medical grounds. He was given compensation of £175,000.

Randy Ingram (1998)

Ingram worked as a warden on travellers' sites in Worcester. He was experienced and capable but problems began when he was given responsibility for additional sites where there was a history of trouble. Randy suffered abusive and violent behaviour at the hands of a group of residents. He began to suffer increasing feelings of isolation and powerlessness. He was the third warden on the site to suffer from a stress-related illness. In 1998 the council recognised that there were serious problems and carried out its own internal inquiry, which was critical of the way the sites were managed. Ingram was awarded record damages of £203,000 for the stress-related illness he suffered.

Beverley Lancaster (1999)

Worked as a housing officer for Birmingham Council. Won £67,000 in damages for work-related stress which forced her to retire at 41 on ill-health grounds. She was promised training and support, but did not get it.