Social Work England gets budget boost to help tackle fitness to practise backlogs

The government has boosted Social Work England’s budget by a quarter, which the regulator will use in part to tackle fitness to practise (FTP) backlogs.

Its revenue budget for 2025-26 is £26.7m, up £5.2m on the 2024-25 figure (£21.5m), with the increase coming entirely in the form of additional funding from the Department for Education (DfE). A DfE grant is one of the regulator’s two sources of income, alongside social worker registration fees.

Should Social Work England’s proposed 33% increase to practitioner fees be implemented later this year, this would add an estimated further £1.1m to its revenue budget for 2025-26.

The news was revealed in the regulator’s 2025-26 business plan, in which it said the extra DfE resource would help it bring down levels of delay in the FTP system, something that would also apply to any additional income from social worker fees.

It plans to significantly increase staffing levels in its triage team, whose role is to decide whether concerns about a social worker merit investigation, and hold more final hearings. At these, panels of adjudicators, who are independent of Social Work England, determine whether a practitioner’s fitness to practise is impaired and, if so, what sanction should be applied.

History of fitness to practise challenges and DfE funding support

Since its inception in December 2019, Social Work England has faced significant challenges managing the FTP system, initially caused by:

• The complexity of cases inherited from the previous regulator, the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC);
• Receiving a higher-than-expected number of FTP concerns about social workers;
• The impact of Covid-19 on its ability to gather information for investigations and hold hearings.

The DfE provided the the regulator with additional funding beyond its core grant in each of 2021-22 (£1.9m), 2022-23 (£5.5m, of which £1.2m was carried over to 2023-24) and 2023-24 (£0.8m), chiefly to tackle FTP backlogs.

Budget constraints restrict number of hearings

However, Social Work England had to reduce final hearing numbers towards the end of the 2023-24 financial year to tackle a projected overspend on its budget.

And then its revenue was cut from a spend of £22.6m in 2023-24 to a budget of £21.5m in 2024-25, further constraining its ability to hold hearings.

Having carried out 125 final hearings in 2023-24, it initially planned to hold only 34 in 2024-25, though it ended up holding 70 after recycling budget from underspends on other areas of expenditure.

As a result of holding fewer hearings, the number of cases awaiting a hearing rose from 378 as of 31 March 2024 to 412 12 months later.

Struggles at earlier stages of FTP process

However, the regulator has also faced challenges progressing cases at the triage and investigations stages, due to staff and leadership shortages and cases being put on hold due to related family court proceedings.

While cases took between took between 11 and 18 weeks to complete the triage stage in each quarter of 2023-24, this rose to between 24 and 33 weeks per quarter in 2024-25. Meanwhile, the number of cases open at this stage rising from 1,025 as of 31 March 2024 to 1,110 by the end of 2024.

The average age of cases that completed the investigations stage was relatively similar between 2023-24 and 2024-25, while the number of cases open at this stage fell from 561 to 459 in the year to 31 March 2025.

However, the average age of remaining investigations rose from 62 to 77 weeks over the course of the year, against a target of 54 weeks, which Social Work England attributed to the time cases were spending in triage and several longstanding investigations.

More success at case examiner stage

Social Work England has had more success at the case examiner stage, where pairs of examiners review the investigation report to determine whether the concerns about the social worker could realistically be proved and, if so, whether their fitness to practise could be found to be impaired.

If these conditions are not met, the case is closed; if they are, the case is either referred to a hearing or, if the examiners judge there is no public interest in holding a hearing but a sanction should be applied, they can seek to agree this with the practitioner through a so-called ‘accepted disposal’.

The regulator met its target to have cases take an average of 12 weeks to complete this stage by the end of 2024-25, with those concluded in the final quarter taking an average of 11 weeks. It also reduced the number of cases open at this stage from 132 to 80 during the year.

In addition, the average age of cases concluded at the case examiner stage fell during the year, from 111 in the first quarter (April to June 2024) to 97 in the last quarter, equivalent to one year and 10 months.

Social workers waiting over two years on average for final outcomes

However, because of the lack of hearings, the average time from an FTP referral to a final outcome (either through a hearing or a case examiner decision) was 128 weeks – equivalent to two years and five months – in January to March 2025.

Across the whole of 2024-25, the average was 113 weeks, compared with 110 weeks in 2023-24.

Cases referred to a hearing that concluded in January to March 2025 took an average of 221 weeks (four years and three months) to resolve, while remaining hearings cases had been on Social Work England’s books for 185 weeks (three and a half years), up from 160 weeks as of March 2024.

The length of these waits has caused concern across the profession, with the British Association of Social Workers (BASW), Social Workers Union (SWU) and UNISON warning last year that the delays were leaving practitioners “in limbo” and often unable to work because employers did not consider them for roles.

Plans to boost triage team

In the foreword to its 2025-26 business plan, Social Work England chief executive Colum Conway said: “This business plan outlines the actions we are taking this year to improve case progression in all areas of the FTP process. An uplift in our grant in aid this year provides us with an opportunity to commit more resources to do this.”

This included investing additional resource into triage to improve timeliness and reduce the high volume of cases currently open at this stage.

Social Work England told Community Care this would involve adding 13 staff to the triage team during 2025-26 by recruiting an extra senior manager and five new staff, extending the contracts of two temporary workers and temporarily moving five workers into the team from elsewhere.

It also pledged to review current triage and investigations processes to identify ways to improve efficiency and effectiveness.

Increasing numbers of hearings

The business plan also included a pledge to use the extra resource to increase hearings capacity, to reduce the number of cases open at this stage. It has not determined as yet how many hearings it plans to hold in 2025-26.

In addition, it is planning a number of steps designed to improve the efficiency of its hearings and case review functions. These includes:

• Recruiting and training an in-house legal advocacy team for its FTP work, rather than outsourcing this, which the regulator estimates will yield about £500,000 in annual savings from 2026-27 onwards.
• Introducing two-person panels for hearings contingent. on the findings of a pilot of this approach carried out in 2024-25. Current practice is for hearings to have three people.
• Consulting on a new approach to managing hearings where the evidence is not disputed – known as consensual panel disposal – which Social Work England says could reduce their length.

New triage objective

Alongside the increased investment, Social Work England has overhauled its targets for measuring its FTP performance.

On triage, it has replaced a target for the average age of the caseload to be less than or equal to 14 weeks with one for the average time taken to complete the process being 26 weeks or less by March 2026.

The change in timeframe reflects the fact that Social Work England is now measuring the start of the triage stage as the point that it receives a concern, rather than the later point when it identifies the social worker concerned.

In a report to its board meeting last month, the regulator said: “This will be a clearer approach to monitoring our performance in triage, taking into account the ongoing delays at this stage of the fitness to practise process.”

As of 31 March 2025, the average age of cases open at the triage stage, based on this new definition, was 34 weeks.

Investigations and case examination measures

It has also changed its investigations target for March 2026, to completing this stage of the process in 54 weeks or less on average.

Unlike the previous target for the investigations caseload being 54 weeks or less on average, the new objective excludes time spent in triage and simply measures the average duration of investigations.

It will retain the target on completing the case examination stage within 12 weeks on average.

New target on overall length of cases

In addition, Social Work England has introduced a new target for the time taken from the receipt of a concern to the final outcome at the case examination stage being 92 weeks on average as of March 2026. This is below the 97-week average recorded in January to March 2025.

There is no equivalent target for the time taken from the receipt of a concern to the final outcome at a hearing, though Social Work England will monitor this measure.

Explaining this decision in a statement to Community Care, a spokesperson for the regulator said: “In 2025 to 2026 we anticipate that in the region of 70% of our fitness to practise concerns will close at the case examination stage, following our investigation into those concerns.

“Showing the time taken to reach this stage allows for greater transparency on how we are progressing and concluding most of our cases, and setting a target here reflects our ambition to improve timeliness at this stage. Once we have addressed the hearings backlog over the coming years, we will then consider how best to set a similar target at the hearings stage.”