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Reviving social work in local government will be top of the agenda in Gordon Jones’s year as chair of the British Association of Social Workers.

Jones claimed that the adult care green paper’s call for social workers to become navigators rather than gatekeepers of services could herald a revival of the profession.

But he said the government would have to invest in social work. “If we are to meet these agendas there will have to be new money.”

Jones, head of older and disabled people’s services at Bridgend Council, said the community care reforms of the early 1990s resulted in social work being marginalised by care management.

He said: “We’ve lost what social work was about because of assessment and care management. The values of social work need to be restored.”