Provisions in the Coronavirus Act 2020 allowing councils to suspend parts of the Care Act 2014 have finally been removed from the statute books, four months after the government’s decision to do so.
The so-called Care Act easements allowed councils to suspend duties to assess needs, carry out financial assessments and make support plans. They also enabled authorities to refuse to meet needs they would normally be under a duty to meet so long as they did not breach the person’s human rights in the process.
The measures, introduced in March 2020, were designed to enable councils to respond if a spike in demand and a depletion of their workforces meant they were unable to fulfil their duties under the Care Act. However, they were strongly criticised as undermining people’s entitlements to care.
They were used by eight of the 152 councils with social services responsibility in England, but not since the end of June 2020.
In March this year, the government said it would be removing the easements, but the regulations enabling it to do so only came into force last week, having been approved by both Houses of Parliament.
Meanwhile, in its latest two-monthly review of the Coronavirus Act, the government said the temporary register – allowing about 13,000 former social workers who have left the profession since March 2018 to practise – would remain in place for now. This was installed to enable employers to respond to depletions in their workforce, caused by sickness or self-isolation, as well as spikes in demand.
A survey in the spring found that just 100 temporary registrants were practising and the previous review of the Coronavirus Act, in May 2021, had said that the government intended to close the register “in the coming months”.
However, this language has removed from the July review of the Coronavirus Act, which simply said that, when the register could be safely removed, the government would work with Social Work England, which manages it, and the Local Government Association to ensure temporary registrants and employers have sufficient notice of the change.
In May, Social Work England chief executive Colum Conway said he wanted to see the register close sooner rather than later, while last month the LGA said that the longer it continued, the less able the regulator would be to regulate those who did not meet the standards required to join the full social work register.
The apparent shift in position from the government may reflect the rising number of people having to self-isolate due to being a close contact of someone who tests positive for Covid-19. In the first week of July, just over 380,000 people were identified as a close contact, the highest figure since mid-January, at the peak of Covid-19’s second wave.
Meanwhile, the Department for Education’s latest survey of councils in relation to Covid’s impact on children’s social care identified a slight uptick in authorities reporting high numbers of social workers being off work because of Covid-19 in mid-June. At that time, 3% of authorities reported 10% of their children’s social workers being off work because of the virus, up from 1% in May 2021, but well below the May 2020 peak of 13%.
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The social worker list should be made more open permanently because older workers who are very well qualified & experienced are still being excluded from employment – yet because of the sudden rise in state pension she , they are required to work longer – but can’t because regulators seem to want them to be more recently qualified & don’t recognise their bona fide original qualifications & CPD – it’s ageism through the narrow view of regulators.
Instead of getting the job done in an effective manner that’s well thought through, older workers are being deterred because of the regulators’ slavery to standardisation and unrealistically evolved opinion.
Would be younger social workers are also getting deterred by the rigid & narrow minded pathways into social work – largely only for folk with already ‘good’ degrees.
Yet young people with invaluable experience spent at the coal face of social work who want to study & work at the same time are being turned away. It just shows you that the profession that purports to support including & difference , just can’t do what it preaches when it comes to recruitment.
How else could the closed shop of middle class do goodery be preserved though?
I can tell you for sure there are many middle class social workers who vote conservative while pretending they actually care about the poor and under-privileged, however, there are many working class graduates like me who entered the profession to try and make a difference. You soon learn, however, that really you can only make a small difference. In a society as obviously divided as ours we need more good working class graduates to enter social work but the pay is poor and the job in all honesty is so hard now that lots of people like me are thinking about leaving the job permanently.
What we don’t need is a watering down, dumbing down call it whatever you like to allow more less qualified staff entry to the job. To allow that will force down standards and will lead to even lower pay for Social Workers. Having just been through 10 years of pay freezes a cut of 25% in pay in real terms we are again facing Austerity and further declines in real term pay. For the record I grew up on a Council estate. Now if you want to talk closed shop look at banking and the city now that really is a closed shop to only the children of the very well connected and privileged.
Agre with everything except the make up of City financiers. More working class traders in derivatives than social work can only dream of.