Will registration body be swamped?

Fears that the General Social Care Council will be swamped by
thousands of registration applications next March have been raised
because social workers are choosing to delay registering.

All qualified social workers must register with the regulator by
April 2005. But delegates said they would have to pay the £30
annual charge twice if they joined this year.

The GSCC warned that if it received a flood of applications at
the 11-hour it would not be able to process them in time.

Director of standards and regulation Mike Wardle said that it
was not his job to advise employers to suspend staff who had not
registered by next April, but emphasised that those workers who had
not would be committing a crime.