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• Leicester director who all councils can thank

Andrew Cozens, the Association of Directors of Social Services’ president-elect, tells Community Care editor Polly Neate that he is motivated by the desire to lead staff through the maze of change.

Even at a time with no structural upheaval or major legislative change in social care (and when was that?), the role of president of the Association of Directors of Social Services is a tall order.

You have to act as a lobbyist, campaigner, spokesperson for your profession and for social services departments, and composer of policy proposals, alongside a formidable day job as a director of social services. You can’t possibly please everyone, for as new president Andrew Cozens admits: “ADSS always struggles with, on the one hand, those who dismiss us as vested interests of senior managers, and on the other hand, those who feel there has been a vacuum where the voice of social care should be, who have very high expectations that we can’t always meet.”

The challenge is made harder as Cozens takes over the presidency by the threat the children’s green paper poses to the role of director of social services, by proposing a statutory director of children’s services, and by the related likely demise of social services departments. This in turn, coupled with the decimation of the social care civil service at the Department of Health and the, as yet, unformed structures at the Department for Education and Skills, threatens to undermine the identity of social care as a distinct discipline. This is even before the new institutions to safeguard it – the General Social Care Council, Social Care Institute for Excellence, and Commission for Social Care Inspection – have properly established themselves.

Not short of answers

With all the questions surrounding the future of his association – and even his profession – it is lucky that Cozens is not short of answers. He has been talking to staff in his own department (Leicester) about what they look for from an ADSS president. “They want a road map through what is a very confusing time professionally and organisationally,” he says.

They also want someone to bang a drum for social care, something Cozens is used to doing. “Being in a new council, a director has to argue about why have social care and social services. Staff say, make sure we are valued for what we do, that there is something distinctive about social care.”

Finally, he believes front-line workers look to the ADSS to be on what he calls the “inside track”, influencing policy. With his reputation as a consummate networker, and his own admission that his activism in the ADSS is partly fuelled by a desire to “see round corners” and to influence what he finds there, Cozens should be just what they need.

He accepts the severity of the threat facing social care, if the government’s drive to improve specific services, irrespective of which profession delivers them, is not informed by a close understanding of the specific contribution of social care.

Cozens believes that the ADSS must work closely with other stakeholders – the GSCC, Scie, CSCI and the Local Government Association – to help the government with a “big idea” for the future of social care. “Has there ever been a better time to be championing social care, when there are so many other people to support you in that?” he asks.

His inaugural speech as president, delivered this week, will “make a pitch for social care as a mainstream service so that a future for social care in local government is assured, not absorbed by education or the NHS”. He explains: “I’m going to call for the abolition of the poor law framework of services and its replacement by a statutory duty of well-being. This would involve a different configuration of social care services so that you get it right for everyone.” It is a step forward from the paper launched this time last year by the Institute for Public Policy Research,¹ sponsored by the ADSS and Community Care, but a step in the same direction.

Like that report, he argues for some radical beliefs about structure that seem a long way from current government thinking. “I’ve always been attracted by the idea that public health has its natural home in local government not the NHS.” Many in social care would agree. But would many ministers?

An idealist

Cozens is an idealist, and not easily daunted. “The shadow of the poor law has hung over us at every turn. Seebohm’s ideals lasted until the money ran out and then we fell back on poor law habits like rationing and eligibility criteria, dividing the deserving from the undeserving. The Children Act 1989 was distorted and became a means of screening people out. The community care legislation was the biggest false dawn. It took a really good idea, which was freedom and creativity for social care staff to use money to tailor individual packages for a relatively small group of people, and became a national framework for rationing access to residential and nursing home care.”

He cites an example from his own experience. As an assistant director in Harrogate when community care was first implemented in 1993, he masterminded an initiative in which everyone using home care got a spring clean. “But we did it once, and after that it was about battening down the hatches and turning people away.”

But will his ideals ever come to life? He knows he needs to make alliances, adding modestly: “It needs some big brains, bigger than mine, to make it work.”

He knows it is an even bigger ambition than the key objective of his most recent predecessors as ADSS president, which has been to improve social care’s public image. That, according to Cozens, is not enough. “Where does social work and social care fit into society? We have to work out what social work is there for. That’s critical if we are fighting our corner in the DfES and DoH. You could either roll over and say, this is the end of social services departments, or see this as an opportunity for social care values to influence mainstream services and reinvent social care as a major force.”

Forget the sceptics

His dramatic talk contrasts markedly with the cautious public pronouncements of his immediate predecessor David Behan. Cozens doesn’t seem to look over his shoulder much. In fact, he is prepared to ignore some critics, having already been slammed in two Daily Mail editorials when director of social services in Gloucestershire – “think mad, then do it” being the most memorable criticism of his management. “I’m not sure how much time we should waste trying to convince the sceptics,” he says.

It’s tempting to draw a link between his idealism and the formative experiences he uses to explain his choice of a social work career and his continuing commitment to its ideals. Both Cozens’ parents died when he was young – his father when he was 13, his mother while he was at university, both after long illnesses during which he and his siblings were carers.

The second experience he cites came later in life. He was working hard, “trying to be the perfect social worker, driving myself into the ground, in a place where there were very few other services, so I was trying to offer the level of support that people wanted”. He was pulled up short by a diagnosis of testicular cancer and found himself in hospital, next to a fellow patient who had a more advanced illness and was too traumatised to consent to his operation. Staff were struggling to communicate with him because he had a learning difficulty, and Cozens became an impromptu advocate. Certainly a salutary lesson on the importance of social care skills in an NHS setting.

Then he was director of social services in Gloucestershire at the time of the infamous Gloucestershire judgement, which allowed the withdrawal of services after redrawing of eligibility criteria and reassessment of need. “That’s the thing I most regret professionally,” Cozens says. “Not because it wasn’t the right thing to do, but because it slammed the door shut on the possibility that that piece of legislation could meet all the aspirations of disabled and older people. It legitimised social care being framed by financial considerations.”

Surely the root of many of his ideas is obvious when he adds: “Part of my motivation is to put that right.”

¹ L Kendall and L Harker (eds), From Welfare to Wellbeing, IPPR, 2002