Labour’s first months in office have not landed well among social workers, a Community Care poll has found.
Since taking power in July, the party has cancelled a planned cap on care costs and ditched the adult social care training and development fund proposed by its Conservative predecessor, cutting funding for 2024-25 in this area by £115m.
As part of this, it scrapped the second round of the adult social work apprenticeship fund, which would have enabled English councils to recruit around 130 social work apprentices in 2024-25.
However, Labour has also announced several reforms, including a long-awaited update to the Mental Health Act 1983, the Children’s Wellbeing Bill, which is designed to strengthen child protection, and the Employment Rights Bill, which would improve pay and working conditions for adult social care staff. How these improvements will be funded remains unclear for now.
In response to our poll, which received 874 respondents, nearly two-thirds of practitioners (63%) called Labour “just another government failing social care by implementing cuts”.
Only 3% said the party was taking “promising steps” despite making cuts, while about a third (34%) felt it was too early to tell.
What is your opinion of Labour’s treatment of social care so far?
Celebrate those who’ve inspired you
For our 50th anniversary, we’re expanding our My Brilliant Colleague series to include anyone who has inspired you in your career – whether current or former colleagues, managers, students, lecturers, mentors or prominent past or present sector figures whom you have admired from afar.
Nominate your colleague or social work inspiration by either:
- Filling in our nominations form with a letter or a few paragraphs (100-250 words) explaining how and why the person has inspired you.
- Or sending a voice note of up to 90 seconds to +447887865218, including your and the nominee’s names and roles.
If you have any questions, email our community journalist, Anastasia Koutsounia, at anastasia.koutsounia@markallengroup.com
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Toryism under a Labour name. Starmer has no understanding of socialism despite describing himself as a socialist
A true Socialist wants everything to be run and owned by the State, and for there to be no private ownership, supposedly for the ‘Greater good’ and to achieve ‘True equality’. Sounds great, but the problem is when everything is owned and run by the State, nothing works particularly well. The reason why Communism / Socialism crumbled around the world (particularly the former Soviet Union) was even under the Communist / Socialist model there was corruption, meaning those at the top of the tree lived ‘High on the hog’ (from the wealth and property they had grabbed aka as theft from the legal owners), whilst those at the bottom were poor and starving. All of the wealthy elites – like Starmer want ‘Socialism’ for others, but not for themselves, as why do they want to give up and re-distribute their wealth? I use to joke and say if Jeremy Corbyn came into power – who is another supposed Socialist (whilst living in an almost 1 million pound house in Islington), I would definitely give up Social Worker, as there is no way in hell I would be prepared to work all those hours in Children’s Social Care, to receive the same amount of an Iceland Worker who earns minimum wage on set hours.
If capitalism and private ownership works do well why do we have endless health and social care services caused? Glibness is one reason why social work will never be a profession, not understanding history is why it will continue to be an irrelevance when solutions are required. Oh and without the Iceland worker or my farmer family you would starve however more you were paid then them. Smug certainties never stand up to scrutiny. Or as my psychiatrist sister puts it, there is a very thin line between convincing yourself that you are better and more entitled than others and a delusional belief. Because we grew up on a farm and miraculously ended up going to university and leaving doesn’t make us better than the farmers we know. But than we were are are always rooted in the reality of the real worth of people and their jobs not on some nonsense obsession about degrees and salaries.
The 2021-22 Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, which called for £2bn to be invested in family help over four years, to rebalance the system away from child protection and reduce the numbers going into care.
Right now we have plenty of talk about early help, but no where near the £2bn. Instead we either underfund or we rob Peter to pay Paul.
Show me the money.
Depressingly, it’s the same old political excuses and NHS reform fixations. ‘Wilful blindness’ is still practiced by Labour politicians now in power who continually ‘kick the social care can down the road’ again. Unfortunately, Wes Streeting has not yet understood or demonstrated he’s the Minister for Health AND SOCIAL CARE. Not impressed so far, as the Lib Dems were the only party who made social care an election/manifesto campaign issue. This new Labour Government is simply ‘Tory light’ with no bold progressive ideas who are happy to sleep-walk into further austerity, greater social care fragmentation and privatisation.
Some people might say it’s the system stupid not the hue of the government. Lobbyists rule social policy not ideological convictions of politicians.