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Alan Milburn, the health secretary, must think that £2m goes a very long way in social work. Two million pounds brought the Social Care Institute for Excellence into existence earlier this month and £2m will fund the social care recruitment campaign which the health secretary is expected to announce at the National Social Services Conference on Friday (19 October). Grand plans, small budgets. Much smaller than the budget for Scie's health equivalent, the National Institute for Clinical Excellence; much smaller than the budgets for comparable recruitment campaigns for nurses, police officers and teachers.

Yet two reports published this week show that the roots of the recruitment and retention crisis in social work run deep, perhaps beyond the reach of any simple solution such as a £2m campaign to improve the profession's image. Image is a big problem for social care, yet there are other factors such as high caseloads, reliance on agency staff, stress, sickness and rock-bottom morale which are driving people out of the profession.

These are the stigmata of social care as listed in the report from the Local Government Association and the Employers' Organisation, Care to Stay? Their survey shows conclusively that cash alone won't solve the social work crisis. The horror stories uncovered during 150 interviews with social workers - staff working in condemned buildings with cardboard boxes for filing cabinets - could of course be alleviated by well-judged capital investment programmes, just as the 53 per cent vacancy rates running in some social services departments could be improved by substantial pay increases. Local authorities could reasonably ask where the money is to come from, but at least the issue is clear cut.

Much less clear is the extent to which the rank management culture in some organisations is responsible for the malaise. Both Care to Stay? and the joint reviews annual report Delivering Results point to the way in which reorganisation has often been used as a panacea whose intended benefits managers have then failed to communicate to front-line staff or service users. Social workers feel embattled and isolated, while their managers are preoccupied with the latest corporate restructuring as their answer to the challenge of modernisation. "Too often such changes become a preoccupation and distraction at the top of the council", says the joint reviews report.

These strictures are hard to bear, especially given the emphasis which the health secretary himself has repeatedly placed on partnership and integration as a means of modernising health and social care. The Health Act 1999 and the NHS Plan are an open invitation to reorganisation, and the Conservative government showed its fondness for structural change by overhauling local government in the mid-1990s. It is a bit rich to blame managers for dispensing the medicine prescribed by the government itself.

The joint reviews report is on firmer ground, however, when it says that the councils which support their workforces are the ones which "not only attract and keep staff but also maintain motivation and morale". The nub of the 1998 white paper Modernising Social Services was not that they should be reorganised, but that they should aim for a better managed, better supervised and better trained workforce. There is a false assumption, unfortunately widespread, that new structures revive dysfunctional workplace cultures. Structures don't, managers do. Performance-related pay, investment in training, and help with housing costs are some of the techniques being tried in a few localities. They are a start, but there are other lessons to learn from these reports. One of them is that change must be managed, properly thought-through, and explained to the front-line staff who must make it work. That would go a long way and certainly further than £2m.