Would you pay more tax to increase spending on services including social care?
- No, taxes are too high already - the government needs to be more efficient. (31%, 878 Votes)
- Yes, we need more funding. (26%, 725 Votes)
- No, taxes should only rise on the wealthiest. (25%, 707 Votes)
- Yes, but I would only pay a social care-dedicated tax (18%, 490 Votes)
Total Voters: 2,800
Loading ...Social care workers have taken strike action claiming that their council is requiring them to carry out tasks appropriate for social workers but without commensurate pay.
Up to 200 social care support and hearing impairment officers from Lancashire council began a walkout over four days on Friday (26 July) in protest about how their roles are graded by the authority.
Their roles involve carrying out assessments and arranging and reviewing care packages for adults in the county. According to their union, UNISON, their caseloads have grown more complex in response to social worker shortages, requiring them to support survivors of domestic abuse, victims of sexual exploitation and people going through periods of serious self-neglect.
Social care support officer Helen said: “After years of underfunding and neglect, my colleagues and I are being expected to carry out duties that used to be reserved for social workers, who are paid significantly more than us. We used to support social workers, now we are used instead of them.
“This issue was raised two years ago, but senior managers have refused to listen. The county council must acknowledge the vital work we do and to regrade our positions so we can continue providing essential care without being stretched beyond our limits.”
Currently, the staff are on grade 6 of the council’s pay scale but believe they should be on grade 7, which pays up to £4,200 a year more.
UNISON North West regional organiser James Rupa said: “Instead of agreeing to the workers’ reasonable request to regrade their roles, the council is refusing to listen. Exhausted staff are leaving their jobs in search of better-paid work elsewhere. Their colleagues that remain in post feel they’ve no option but to take action.
“If the status quo is allowed to continue, the council will face further issues with recruitment and retention. This will have a devastating impact on Lancashire’s most vulnerable residents.”
In response, a Lancashire council spokesperson said: “Robust contingency arrangements are in place to ensure business continuity and that the people we serve are not adversely affected should strike action occur.
“We had started an appeals process linked to the regrading applications from a group of our social care support officers [SCSOs] in which SCSOs and the trade unions have been fully involved. At present, the unions, alongside the SCSOs’ organising committee, have taken the decision to pause the appeal process.
“The county council is committed to continuing the appeals process and are continuing to work with our staff and the trade union to reach a positive resolution to the ongoing dispute.”
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For anyone interested in the actual figures i have done a quick google to find Lancashire council pay Structure that is published. Grade 6 seems to cap out at £29,777 while Grade 7 seems to cap out at £33,945
based upon this information i fully support and show my solidarity with my fellow social workers in Lancashire
It’s such a simple solution to the dire recruitment and retention of social workers issue.
The social care support officers always go way above and beyond and have done for years. Lancashire county council continue to exploit them and then have the audacity to say they are easily replaced if they dont agree with the decision.
Give them the choice to take on more complex work for a higher pay scale and support the social workers to do their job.
Instead we are left with overworked social workers, huge numbers of vacancies and deskilled SCSO’s as well as complete loss of motivation.
Considering the majority of SW are only paid at Grade 8 (starting at around £34K) with all the responsibilities that go with that role, perhaps they need a regrading too! They have also undertaken a degree to achieve their qualification too!
Since the regrading request, the SCSO’s no longer undertake the tasks highlighted in this article.
However, considering the responsibility now undertaken by Social Care staff in general, in many ways, is much greater than health staff/ assistants, who are paid more, then perhaps some parity would be good.
Hi healthcare here.
I’m not sure what you mean by more responsibility than healthcare staff?
My recent experience of social care has been that social cares responce to abuse has been abhorrent.
Healthcare staff literally take life or death decisions every day. That’s quite a lot of responsibility
Social works appear to have a hundred meetings pass responsibility to everyone else by the time they are all done the situation has changed anyway while they blame everyone else.
Healthcare has a legal duty of candor children’s just cover up their failings and abuse of kids in their care. Health care professionals can go to prison for poor care. Children’s services just lie to cover op sexual abuse in their care with no consequences
Not convinced that feeling sorry for yourself for the responsibility of the job carries much water
I don’t know why you’re pitting health and social care workers against each other. I work in an integrated team with health and social care staff and we are all in it together. I work with nurses, therapists, psychiatrists, psychologists and of course other social workers, we are very much supportive of one another. I am sorry that your opinion of social workers is so low but i have the bonus of seeing both working together. However I also see that Nurses get ‘claps’ and praise for their hard work, whereas social workers get villified (much like your comments), and stereotyped. It was a running joke that any joint visits the nurses will specify that they’re nurses not social workers as they know that social workers are judged, and these types.of comments from a HCP is feeding into that.
I think you need to re read the article here. Also perhaps ask to shadow social workers and their support staff to truly understand what we do.
I understand they should not be expected to carry out qualified Social Work duties. However, how can the council upgrade them when they don’t have the qualifications. Anyone wanting to be a social worker needs a Social Work degree
I’d agree with Carol and SP here in some respects – if there’s little difference between a social care officer salary and registered social workers, that’s an issue. Why work for the qualification if the pay difference is not so great…
Respectfully, social workers are not the only professionals in the social care sector who are degree qualified! Many youth workers, family support workers and other non-social work practitioners have degrees. This is a big part of the problem, the skills of practitioners are often not recognised or taken seriously because they are not registered with SW England. There are many qualifications that are directly EQUIVALENT to social work and just as valuable within multidisciplinary teams. Unfortunately, hierarchy and cuts in other areas seems to restrict career development unless an individual is SW qualified (which is not in itself the answer to everything)!
I think the issue is that SCSOs have been doing social work tasks that they shouldn’t have for years so it’s just become normal without the recognition or qualification, lack of social workers and covid certainly hasn’t helped. SCSOs are integral to adult social care and as a social worker, I would struggle to do my job without their expertise.
I would not be happy to pay more taxes. All that seems to happen is that more layers of management are put in place. They then act like whippong boys instead of ensuring that appropriate and adequate resources are in place to support social workers to undertake the work their demanding caseloads require. I am so pleased I had other skills and qualifications I could fall back on. I have left the profession and only look back with regret that I did not leave sooner, I now have a work life balance and actually enjoy life!
Started in childrens years ago, Early Help became more child in need and low level cp. Problem with social work it does not have a voice for the profession, BASW weak, not strike policy
I’ve worked in a mash type setting for years now as a social worker and I 100% agree with your comment.
There’s loads of cin and CP cases managed under early help, or cases closed/stepped down to early help when they should be cin,CP or even court proceedings. I also know loads of support workers who go above and beyond their pay grades.
Sadly I don’t think that there is any quick fix for children’s social care. The people who we try to support are subject to so much poverty and deprivation and all the issues that go along with this. We can attempt to address parenting issues where we can, but ultimately we are powerless to change the poverty and deprivation that our families are living in.
The difficulty of the work has never been a successful way to negotiate better pay; a demonstration of the differences between qualified and non-qualified has, traditionally, been the differential based on acquired experience and taught knowledge about why and how society and the institutions in it are formed and exist, the socio-legal-technical competency and expertise needed in handling, and acting as if the Local Authority, in each case held.
Support staff cannot do this. Period. It’s unlawful.
The so called ‘bottle knecks’ of this type will only add further impetus to the creation of the very market conditions which ought not to feature at all in such services areas.
Where’s the oversight, where’s the planning?
And, crucially whose services are they anyway?
Poor pay, inflexible working conditions, many badly thought out changes made quickly making the job more difficult and stressful. Then this justified strike has been dealt with in an aggressive and unsympathetic way by management. It’s no wonder workers have had enough and are leaving LCC.
It’s inaccurate to say that many SCSO’s are leaving their jobs. Many of them have been in the same positions for many years and have been complaining and refusing and what they are will and won’t do for much of that time, making demands and have become quite militant. subsequently the qualified social workers leave their posts as it effects their morale. Many social workers are paying back student loans as they have been to uni and worked for their degree. SCSOs who have reached the top of their pay grade earn nearly 30k a year. Not much less than a newly qualified social worker. That’s a fair salary for a job that does not require any qualifications. If they don’t like it they have a choice but rarely seem to utilise this.
Once Upon a Time the routes into being a Social Worker were more widely cast to ensure that the necessary variety of people were employed to meet population demands ~ one route was called the Accreditation of Prior Experiential Learning (APEL) there’s surely enough requisite curiosity to find a way through this?
Wakefield MDC, as other Councils did ages ago ~ so what’s the real problem?
And, what is it that really matters?
As there’s a shortage of Social Workers, perhaps Social Care staff could retrain if they want the Social Work pay. I agree that Social Care staff should not be taking on the work of a Social Worker, as the 3 year degree offers the underpinning knowledge required for the responsibility of the job, also the requirement to renew their SWE registration (and the costs involved), to ensure they are fit to practice. How are Social Care staff being overseen to the extent of Social Workers if they’re doing the same work? It’s not fair on anyone! Least of all the people receiving the services. It is disappointing to read this is being boiled down to pay, rather than worker and service user safety!
SCSO’s do not do the same work as social workers. By any stretch of the imagination their work is a lot less complex only they don’t see that. There are opportunities for SCSO’s to undertake the apprentice social training funded by local authority should they want to be a qualified social worker. It depends whose accountx you listen to. But some social workers just like to get on with their work without listening to constant moaning.
There isn’t a shortage of adult social workers in most areas. Another misconception. There are social workers who can’t get a job actually
As an SCSO I’d like to say that the implication that we are minimally qualified and experienced is inaccurate. Many of us are graduates with years of experience providing a range of complex support including social care and mental capacity assessments, advocacy, coaching, trusted assessor provision of aids and equipment, support planning, commissioning care support, arranging direct payments, safeguarding, multidisciplinary working with a wide variety of health, local authority, housing, police, lfrs, DWP, and community partners. Along with extensive training, completed alongside social work colleagues, some of us have completed social work training and many of us have come with years of professional experience gained elsewhere in different related roles. My caseload has always been mostly people with complex and multiple conditions and needs e.g dementia, Parkinsons, severe mental health diagnoses, MND, end of life, severe self neglect, drug and alcohol conditions. This role not only involves completing Care Act and Mental Capacity Act assessments and commissioning formal social care support but often also supporting people with issues involving housing, benefits, domestic and other kinds of abuse, social isolation, accessing health and other community services etc. I value working alongside qualified social workers and they recognise that the difference between our roles is small and yet our weekly allocation of cases is double. When LCC itself recognised that its SCSOs were working at a grade higher than that for which they were being paid, management stated that this would change. However, that never happened and it’s approach has appeared to be one of “suck it up or leave” along with recent changes which will increase our workload, described by a senior manager as being “good to push staff out of their comfort zone” – not sure if they included themselves. Essentially, we would like our professionalism and efforts to be recognised and for our salary to reflect the work which LCC itself discovered we do.
So the opposite is true? The requirements for a social work qualification is no longer required to do the job?
This local authority has found a way to recruit answers or train people to fulfil its needs on the cheap.
Yet, I am deliberately provocative, the over professionalisation of ‘the job’ is a systemic problem at a community level as seen in Leeds ~ and the most glaring illustration today is on, kinship care, no?
Once over the generic category of domiciliary care having been differentiated by patient-client-group-need ‘home care’. The, and then, grading of workers was as manual staff and this was challenged on the grounds of sex discrimination; the hike in salaries forced the development of home-care markets; initially, and largely by local women organising themselves and being helped to form businesses as an alternative to Council run services.
Councils were more than keen to ‘outsource’ the work. The, then, DofH guidance of 2004 said that services of upto 10hrs week could be outsourced ~ the reality was that services of much higher demand like 100/150 hrs/week were routinely outsourced as the financial demand on in-house services pushed Council’s into special measures. Spurious calculations emerged as industry rules of thumb, like, 10mins supervised meds ~ it’s simply crazy metrics.
The policy and practice has always been seriously skewed ~ there is no actual freedom of contract.
Where regrading happened it did so on claims of the technical competency required to do the more difficult jobs by saying that they are different than before.
But based on what metrics? Forcing the overall costs of in-house services higher than that of the, now, aggressively competitive commercial sector.
There’s solid operational research around and Government ought to consult with those people who have been there seen it and done before, like say, former Sunderland MP Chris Mullin and JohnPhilipson, one of the last Directors of Social Services (and Bridget Philipson’s brother).
The current playbook is set up to be a ‘fix that fails’ the rejection of Dilnot is an invitation for a radical change in policy to align intentions with locally determined action rooted in the places people live. The path dependency on EU market drivers is over unless it’s simply replaced by other equity backed investment from the Danes or the US ~ primary care has already made this possibility ever so real.
The procurement fiasco in Middlesbrough is an important signifier that ‘competitive rivalry and procurement processes’ are simply not and never have been suited to the job.
Having a solid and reliable local employer that can demonstrate effective learning and leadership (it’s called requisite variety, agility and variety attenuation) is being tested, again!
Showing strategic and managerial oversight is very much in ‘the gaze’ of investors too ~ the public are major stakeholders and their local representatives must organise locally and consult on this matter ASAP.
The navigation of the financial help needed for Kinship Care is an opportunity for a refresh.
Where’s the oversight?
Yes it is still required to undertake all necessary tasks to fulfill the job role.
It’s this what has been, now, for decades and is being tested again ~ all the social policy legislation since Modernising Local Government and the 2002 Act has been away from ‘Social Work’ as the sole domain of a Local Authority.
The opportunity for public debate on such lost by the derogation of this competency to the, then, EU. The statecraft needed both locally and centrally has never been cultivated.
In 2014 the HofC sat for such discussions on (i) Welfare Reform, (ii) Reform of the Civil Service and (iii) Social Protection and the EU ~ during the first two debates it was standing room only in the HofC for the third, seven MPs remained in their seats ~ the writing was on the wall ~ Bill Cash and Dennis Skinner were in agreement that too much had been left in the hands of unelected EC bureaucratics; they weren’t wrong.