The summer reprieve given to the arm's-length public bodies that dominate the social care scene, the Commission for Social Care Inspection and the General Social Care Council, may turn out to have been temporary. On that occasion they survived plans to cut the number of arm's-length bodies, apparently vindicating the views of both organisations' leaders that the CSCI and GSCC were vital to the sector's future. But the continuing pressure for efficiency savings, which resurfaced as a theme of the chancellor's pre-Budget statement last week, always made the status of the two organisations provisional.

What now has to be considered is whether a strong case can be made for realigning them both that goes beyond mere financial expediency. According to the Department of Health, the plan is that the CSCI and the Healthcare Commission will continue to work closely together with the long-term aim of "combined health and social care inspection", presumably code for a merger. The GSCC has been asked to forge closer links with the Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence, the umbrella body for the nine regulators that oversee the health sector. At the same time, Ofsted and the CSCI alongside the Audit Commission will conduct reviews of children's services. Ofsted is likely to emerge as the senior partner and its long-term potential for taking an even more dominant role is obvious.

The loser in this exercise will be the identity of social care. It used to be said that the arm's-length bodies, including the training body Topss, had a crucial role in maintaining the integrity and independence of social care against the disciplines that threatened to engulf it: health and education. But as the regulators themselves are swallowed up in this way - even Topss England faces being split down the middle - this argument will become harder to sustain. The danger is that adult social care becomes a mere adjunct of health, and children's social care of education. This must not be allowed to happen if qualities such as advocacy, empowerment and the social model of care are not to be sacrificed. It was always a possibility that, as the social care workforce became more qualified, the burden on it to protect its own inheritance would increase. Now it has begun to happen.