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How many social workers today feel at heart that their profession exists in name only? For those who became social workers 20 or 30 years ago, the essential concern was to help clients find the most acceptable solutions to their problems. However, during the early 1980s, the decentralised client-centred model of social work practice gave way to a cash-led procedure-centred model.

Social workers are no longer in professional caring relationships with clients. Instead they are expected to "deliver a product to the customer", forcing the human creativity that should characterise all good social work into the framework of a commodity transaction. There is a prevalent and unhealthy obsession with documentation, computer systems, cash and control by management hierarchy. The rationale for all this is that it is about "best value" for the client, when in fact it has nothing whatsoever to do with the client.

Human dilemmas, problems and heartache are complex and demanding, and the shifting social kaleidoscope demands that the social worker be able to employ imagination and improvisation, thinking and making decisions on their feet in relation to the needs of the client. Without this flexibility the profession is bound to neglect core responsibilities.

Today we have a situation where, according to NSPCC statistics, between one and two children die every week in the UK as a result of abuse and neglect, sometimes involving inappropriate social work intervention. The Association of Directors of Social Services complains of not having sufficiently trained staff available. Could it be that the ideology that underpins social work practice is itself dysfunctional, taking life when it should be protecting and nurturing it?

In my experience, managers have frequently said that I should be expected to spend only 20 per cent of my time with the client. The rest should be procedure-bound cash-led social work, wrapping endless red tape around me to make accountants feel good. I was told not to expect to do anything creative in social work on the grounds that "those days are over".

It has always seemed to me that the need for clients to find their personal humanity was paramount, in a world that strips them of dignity and freedom at many levels. The depersonalisation of current social work not only increases this process, but also directly affects the social worker. She or he is stripped of professional meaning.

Money has replaced the social work ethic that people and their needs are ends in themselves. Human life is not a product - it is a process. It is a living organic reality, not a price tag on a tin. Social work must honour this truth if it is to grow as an honourable profession in a dishonourable society.

Mark Newns is an agency social worker and is currently working on a PhD thesis.