Police autonomy is the way forward for social work

Social work often entails simply filling in repetitive forms and computer exemplars within a specific timescale. Such aspects of managerialism are usually meaningless as far as clients are concerned. Despite this, as reported recently in Community Care, research from Huddersfield and Lancaster universities indicates that social workers, especially those in children and young people's duty and assessment teams, spend 80% of their time doing precisely this.

Perhaps social workers, together with social care workers more generally, could take a note out of the police's book. Newly created pilot projects in four police areas allow individual officers to decide if the full force of the law needs to come into play when dealing with minor misdemeanours. The projects, which are a result of the police lobbying the Home Office, means that there will more concern to serve the public rather than simply meet government/management targets. Some of the press reported this as a resulting return to "common sense policing"; it is just a pity, of course, that it ever went away.

More seriously, surely social workers should have at least an element of professional discretion returned to them. This would allow old social work values - the importance of relationships, treating people with dignity and respect, working at their pace, being non-judgemental, a concern with social justice and so on - to come into play.

Perhaps this would be a return to "common sense social work", which would certainly be no bad thing. If we want to reclaim social work, as Iain Ferguson urges us to do in his excellent new book Reclaiming Social Work: Challenging Neo-Liberalism and Promoting Social Justice, this would be an important start.

Admittedly social care workers do not have the political clout of the police so it remains to be seen whether New Labour will allow what could be seen as backtracking in this area of micro-policy and management. And for what it is worth, I very much doubt that the Tories, despite their warm words at times, would do so either.