by Peter Beresford, service user and professor of social policy at Brunel UniversityWe may do well to mark 23 October 2009 in our diaries as the day that mainstream social work started fighting back. This was the day that Hilton Dawson, much welcomed new chief executive of BASW, confronted the Children's Secretary, Ed Balls, over his refusal to reduce the inspection and recording bureaucracy that keeps social workers away from face to face contact with service users. Such contact is crucial to provide support and stop things going wrong.
Hilton Dawson's statement to Balls 'That response simply won't do' represents a bold new departure for social work. No wonder it made the pages of the mainstream press. It's likely to become social work's equivalent of Nelson's 'England expects'.
Lacking in courage
The Social Work Task Force has rightly been critical of the leadership of social work and social care. With a few historical exceptions like Daphne Statham and Denise Platt, too often it has been seriously lacking in courage and determination. Where have been the determined voices from on high supporting social workers, social care workers and service users as they have battled with hostile and vindictive politicians and right-wing tabloids?
Of course it isn't enough to castigate social work's own leaders. If even a task force appointed by government can highlight the difficulties its leaders have, speaking out for social work, then there is clearly a much bigger problem also to be recognised. It's the problem of politicians, policy makers and opinion-formers who too often have been prepared to take the easy stigmatising line on welfare and welfare service users, rather than having the guts to be serious about policy for the powerless, however much they may feel it is a vote loser.
Building new alliances
Under its new chair and chief executive, BASW is already talking about building new alliances with service users and their organisations. I for one wish them well in their efforts to take forward their efforts for social work with new vigour and determination. I for one will do my best to support any such inclusive and effective approach to advancing the rights and needs of the people who need support from social care and social work, as well as to support the face to face practitioners who have long been left beleaguered by social work and social care's leadership.
Lacking in courage
The Social Work Task Force has rightly been critical of the leadership of social work and social care. With a few historical exceptions like Daphne Statham and Denise Platt, too often it has been seriously lacking in courage and determination. Where have been the determined voices from on high supporting social workers, social care workers and service users as they have battled with hostile and vindictive politicians and right-wing tabloids?
Of course it isn't enough to castigate social work's own leaders. If even a task force appointed by government can highlight the difficulties its leaders have, speaking out for social work, then there is clearly a much bigger problem also to be recognised. It's the problem of politicians, policy makers and opinion-formers who too often have been prepared to take the easy stigmatising line on welfare and welfare service users, rather than having the guts to be serious about policy for the powerless, however much they may feel it is a vote loser.
Building new alliances
Under its new chair and chief executive, BASW is already talking about building new alliances with service users and their organisations. I for one wish them well in their efforts to take forward their efforts for social work with new vigour and determination. I for one will do my best to support any such inclusive and effective approach to advancing the rights and needs of the people who need support from social care and social work, as well as to support the face to face practitioners who have long been left beleaguered by social work and social care's leadership.
Thank you for this, Peter. It ties in with my thoughts about the hypocrisy of New Labour in calling for everyone else to be 'accountable' in time that government and employers do not pay for. At the same time the stingey privatisers of the welfare state determine to "take people and grind them until the pips squeak" [quote attributed to the late media magnate Robert Maxwell].
I was a paid 'bank' social care worker on cover duties in 2005 to 2006. My service users were adults with learning difficulties receiving minimal in-service training thanks to Gordon Brown's imposition of 'efficiency savings' upon 'efficiency savings' upon local government. In my service user contacts, it appeared to me that the service users had minimal contact with their assigned social workers. So I was very much aware of the importance of the 'contact notes' that I gave on time sheets. Yet along with pre-briefing myself by studying 'Essential Information' sheets before contact sessions, travelling between shifts and completing time sheets, giving contact notes was in my own unpaid time. I was only paid for my contact hours.
The hourly rate was about £8.71 per hour and I averaged about six hours per week of paid time most weeks -- rendering me still dependent upon Jobseekers Allowance, with an 'earnings disregard' of just £5 per week -- unchanged since 1988. That might not have been so bad, but with JSA admin meltdown, I was kept waiting for months on end for JSA top-up to part-time earnings after cover duties over the Christmas period led to my earnings going above JSA levels. And with JSA admin erroneously telling my council that I was not entitled to JSA and therefore not entitled to Housing Benefit, I was put under undue stress. That and limited job prospects as a social care worker swayed me toward giving up such financially unrewarding employment with responsibilities that New Labour was not interested in equipping workers to do. (With a vast array of service user requirements and conditions, it was as if I was supposed to be an 'all terrain vehicle' and I was being taken for a ride.)
I came across something similar in 2008 when I underwent training for a Certificate in Teaching in the Lifelong Learning Sector with LB Hammersmith & Fulham Adult Education Service. We were told that keeping records and developing 'Individual Learning Plans' for adult learners was all part of a teacher's accountability, yet such things were not likely to be included in our paid hours as teachers of adults.
Now I observe that, UK-wide, unpaid family carers save the NHS £87 billion pounds a year. Despite this acknowledged fact that can be easily Web-searched, the UK Government is forcing unpaid family carers 'of working age' into 'work-related activity' as cash crops for privatised, bonus-hungry scheme providers. (I am not sure how many of those unpaid family carers are below the statutory retirement age.) As Carer Watch and others affected point out, the displacement of unpaid family carers into 'work related activity' in a time of recession is not the way to secure the funding of social care together.
Further, the tag of 'bully' should not be applied exclusively to the Secretary of State for Children, Schools & Families. Minister for Disabled People Jonathan Shaw is another ideal candidate for that title. He replies to reports that most Employment & Support Allowance claimants have been severely let down by the administration of it, by saying that ESA has succeeded in making its claimants "more pro-active" toward finding paid work. Yet most claimants of ESA -- like myself -- have been rated by Atos Medical Services as having zero entitlement to that benefit.
After decades of unemployment benefit dependence co-existing with working-life long volunteering, I refuse to go back to JSA this side of my tribunal that is likely to take place in January 2010 or even March. I have encountered years of the periodic inspection and recording bureaucracy of explaining that I as a jobseeker had been a genuine job applicant but not been rewarded with many job interviews even. I was told by JobCentre staff, "I wish our other clients could be as diligent with their detail as you have." Yet I was never given any extra bargaining power.
It was really only through the intervention of a local mental health charity that I approached, and a more sympathetic general practitioner, that I got round to making an initially successful application for ESA. Yet I had been registered with Disability Employment Advisers at my local jobcentre since 1996. (About six tenures of DEA passed through my one jobcentre in the course of about eight years, without any of them directing me toward Incapacity Benefit.)
What the ESA regime has done for me is make me more proactive in combatting the bullying tactics of pernicious promoters of the privatisation of welfare. If I did not have such a constructive channel for my rage and experiential insights, being denied my rightful entitlement would lead me to proactively press a self-destruct button.
As the mother of an autistic 16 year old has said to me, "We have a responsibility for those who follow us." The likes of Balls and Shaw lack true leadership. As English songwriter Allan Taylor has written, "Tell me who's the one who fights until he's broken? Is it the ones who sit in judgement of us all? ... They don't listen, or even answer to the call."