Social Workers

Lord Watson of Invergowrie Excerpts

Wednesday 16th May 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Kennedy for securing this debate on a subject of much greater importance than is evident from the number of noble Lords who have chosen to participate.

I start by also paying tribute to the essential work that is undertaken by social workers the length and breadth of the country. As my noble friend Lord Kennedy said in his opening remarks, they transform lives—often the lives of children and vulnerable adults unable to care for themselves. We all, even if we have never personally made contact with them in a professional context, owe a debt of gratitude to social workers for the service that they contribute to making this a caring and civilised society. So we should all be concerned at the content and conclusions of the report by Dr Ravalier and Mr McGowan.

Workplace stress is a well-known determinant of employee health and is the biggest cause of long-term sickness absence in the UK public sector. It can and does cause both physical and psychological ill health, yet it is both an underestimated and an underreported problem. It should be neither, because it is calculated to cost the UK economy approximately £800 per employee each year. Given that the public sector workforce numbers some 5.5 million, that amounts to around £4.4 billion annually. For that reason, it comes as something of a surprise to learn that the Ravalier-McGowan report is in fact the first of its kind into stress within the social work profession.

I have to say that, hitherto, I have been much more aware of stress among another part of the public sector workforce: schoolteachers. The National Union of Teachers conducted a survey of its members in 2016 and found that 90% had considered giving up teaching in the previous two years because of the workload. In response, the Department for Education produced three reports in an attempt to reduce workload pressures for teachers and committed to an annual review of workloads. That process is continuing, but the teacher unions are facing the workload challenge and working with the DfE to get assurances on workload reduction. It is clear that what is required is a similarly positive approach from government as regards social workers and their workload.

The Ravalier-McGowan report contains some stark and troubling findings, perhaps the most hard-hitting of which is the revelation that UK social workers are working more than £600 million-worth of unpaid overtime each year. The profession is unequivocal in its view that it is government cuts to services that have led to the forced extra hours. Because social workers have too many cases allocated to them and have to cope with the associated administrative work, they work an average of 64 days a year of unpaid overtime. That is the equivalent of more than nine weeks’ work. I await with interest the Minister’s view on that rather chilling statistic. We should pause to consider what that means for the public sector pay bill. It is a double whammy, because social workers are asked to do more—some of it unpaid —with fewer resources. It is also a double whammy for the Government, because not only do they save money through cutting the resources allocated to local authorities, and hence social work departments, they then get greater productivity from social work staff, whose dedication to their job and the vulnerable people they joined the profession to help means that they do not incur the additional wage costs to which they are entitled.

Unprecedented upheavals are taking place in the social work sector due to reforms that include—as the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, referred to—a new regulator, new and untested models of delivery and new routes to qualification. Closures to services because of cuts to local government budgets are welcome, but inconsistent efforts to integrate health and social care are adding to the rising demand on social workers. These events highlight the necessity of finding ways to reduce staff turnover among social workers and to prevent them leaving the sector altogether. Unsurprisingly, the volume and the diversity of the work was found to be directly related to increased stress levels. That and poor working conditions means that over half of social workers say they intend to leave the role within the next 18 months. Dr Ravalier pulled no punches when he commented that:

“What our research has revealed is that most social workers are actually deeply fulfilled by their work but the satisfaction they feel can no longer outweigh the lack of support they are experiencing … If this keeps up, and the social workers we spoke with do leave the profession, local authorities will be forced to pay for contract workers who are expensive, transient, and certainly won’t be working lots of free hours”.


Furthermore, the respondents to the Ravalier-McGowan survey also described that, all too often, there was a culture within social work of institutional racism that played against non-white employees. In addition,

“with respect to those social workers with a disability, respondents described a lack of understanding from management and colleagues within their organisation, and others also described a lack of reasonable adjustments for their disability at work”.

I would be obliged if the Minister would comment on that aspect of the report as well.

The impact of the working conditions of social workers—particularly excessive overtime, which means that they simply have too many cases to manage—could lead to an increased risk of crisis situations developing. Noble Lords will be only too aware of a number of tragic cases in recent years, which led to the new Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel emanating from the Children and Social Work Act 2017.

The British Association of Social Workers has identified several developments that it believes are necessary if we are to avoid—or at least reduce to a bare minimum—such crisis situations. It has called for a reduction of the demands placed on social workers to ease stress and attrition rates. That means employing more social workers, ensuring a consistent approach to caseload allocation and enabling flexible and remote working through improved use of technology. The BASW believes that not enough time is currently available for reflective supervision to work through complex cases and it urges that additional administrative support be made available to enable social workers to focus on their caseloads. Perhaps the most pertinent proposal from a morale point of view is the need to end the blame culture that the media first seize upon and then feed off. That means giving social workers the respect and positive support that their dedicated professionalism deserves.

There is much in the report that is the subject of this debate that should both inform and alarm us. I make no apology for again quoting the authors:

“What the research has revealed is that most social workers are actually deeply fulfilled by their work but the satisfaction they feel can no longer outweigh the lack of support they are experiencing”.


That must sound a warning to Government, and I cannot believe that anyone, be they Ministers or officials, not to mention the Chief Social Worker, can have read the report with anything other than a sense of foreboding.

Ten months have now passed since the report was published; there has been adequate time to consider it. The key now is for the Minister to inform us what she and her department intend to do in response to the report’s findings and recommendations, and I look forward to her reply to the debate.

[Baroness Manzoor (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy of Southwark, on securing this important debate. I thank all other noble Lords for their valuable contributions today. There was a small number of speakers, but the debate has been excellent. Noble Lords have set out many challenges that social workers can face, and I will endeavour to answer as many questions as I can in the time I have.

This report, Social Workers—Working Conditions and Wellbeing, raises some pertinent questions for all of us who want to see social workers valued and recognised for the vital work they do. I agree with all noble Lords who spoke—the noble Lords, Lord Kennedy, Lord Parekh and Lord Watson and the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley—that we need to understand and think about the vital work that social workers do and really recognise the efforts that have been made. I recognise that this is a difficult time for social work and for social care. We know that local authority budgets have faced pressures in recent years and of course the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy alluded to this. That is why we have taken steps to help to secure a strong and sustainable social care system. We have given councils access to up to £9.4 billion more dedicated funding for adult social care over three years. Moreover, we have supported councils to use the flexibility in funding for children’s social care to increase spending to around £9.2 billion for children and young people’s services in 2016-17.

This summer, the Department for Health and Social Care will publish a Green Paper on care and support for older people and a joint health and care workforce strategy. These publications will be vital in helping to achieve a long-term sustainable future for the social care system and address the challenges facing the social care workforce. I agree with everyone who spoke that we want social work to be a respected and valued profession that supports people to remain in it for the whole of their career, should they wish it. We recognise the impact that high workloads, stress and low morale have on recruitment and retention. That is why the Government continue to provide the £58 million social work bursary, which supports over 4,000 students into social work courses. We also continue to provide £20 million through the education support grant for practice placements for social work students.

The Government must do all they can, as has already been said, to empower and champion social work, but we must also acknowledge the responsibility of local authorities to ensure social workers have manageable workloads and receive quality supervision and support, which prioritises practice over process. The noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, said that 92% of social workers are leaving over time. I have to stress that the survey looked at only 12,000 social workers out of a 92,000 workforce. While this number is troubling, it is not really representative of the whole profession when new practice models and improved supervisions—

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie]

I thank the noble Baroness for giving way. Frankly, that statement cannot go unchallenged. Opinion polls covering the whole of the UK—some 60 million people—are held to be reasonable based on 1,000 respondents. A survey of 12,000 out of 90,000 seems to me to be a pretty high and representative sample of the profession.

[Baroness Manzoor]

The number is 1,200. If I said 12,000, I apologise. I am not saying that it is not troubling, but I am saying that the survey looked at only 1,200 out of a workforce of 92,000. Although it is troubling, it is not really a fully representative picture of the whole profession. However, I understand the problems: the noble Lord shakes his head, but what I am saying is that we need to look at improving working conditions and practice quality. I entirely agree with the assertion that the noble Lord has made.

The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, also asked about heavy caseloads leading to a lack of preventive work. She spoke of Cafcass and the very important improvements that have taken place there in relation to children’s social work. There is increasing evidence of innovative practices and approaches for supporting children and young people. I agree with her that this shows examples of very good practice. Ofsted inspections are including caseloads and supervisions in their judgments on quality of local authority children’s services, and this is to be welcomed.

The noble Baroness and the noble Lord, Lord Watson, also asked about further workloads and improving supervision and support of social workers to ensure that they had appropriate workloads. We are improving staffing capacity and the children’s social workers have increased to approximately 30,000 in statutory children’s services over the last two years. The noble Lord also asked about pay. As well as outlining the challenges facing the profession, the report suggests that there are some solutions to help improve social workers’ working conditions. I have just alluded to what we are doing in relation to pay.

The noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, asked about strategies that the Government are undertaking overall. The Government have an ambitious programme to raise the status and standing of the social work profession. I want to highlight the action we are taking in some key areas, which will help to deliver the improvements we all want to see.

In professional regulation, an area raised by all noble Lords, we are establishing a new specialist regulator for social work, as the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, mentioned: Social Work England. Focused purely on social work, this bespoke regulator will cover the whole profession and have public protection at the heart of all of its work—the noble Lords, Lord Watson, Lord Kennedy and Lord Parekh, said that they wanted to see greater emphasis placed on prevention. The new body will be about more than just this. We want to support professionalism and standards across the profession. As a social work-specific regulator, it will be able to develop an in-depth understanding of the profession and use this to set standards for the knowledge, skills, values and behaviours required to become and remain a registered social worker. That addresses the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley. Finally, it will play a key role in promoting public confidence in the profession and helping to raise the status and standards of social work.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, said, I am sure noble Lords will join me in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Patel of Bradford, on his role as the newly appointed chair of Social Work England as he leads work to establish the regulator in 2019.

As the noble Lords, Lord Kennedy, Lord Parekh and Lord Watson, and the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, said, education, training and continuous professional development is absolutely key. I have already addressed the issue regarding Cafcass that the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, raised, the importance of staff development and case planning and the improvements that Cafcass has undertaken. I am sure that the new regulator will look at those models very carefully.

We are making sure that those entering the social work profession receive the best training possible. We have established 15 teaching partnerships, bringing together universities and local authorities to improve the quality of social work education. We are also delivering fast-track programmes to bring high-potential graduates into the social work profession. For newly qualified social workers entering the profession, the transition from education to the realities of practice can, as we know, be daunting. That is why we have introduced an assessed supported year in employment to provide social workers with valuable additional support during their first year in practice. The programme has benefited over 20,000 child and family and adult social workers since 2012, helping to improve recruitment, retention and performance management.

For established social workers we are funding a range of assessment and development programmes to enable people to progress into more specialist or senior roles. I hope that addresses the question raised by the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy. We are also supporting social workers who have left the profession and want to return, through the Return to Social Work programme, with the aim to train up to 100 social workers across three regions.

In conclusion, local authorities, like all parts of government, have had to make difficult choices to help us balance the public finances. We also recognise that demand for social care services is rising. That is why, across adult and children’s services, we are looking at how local authorities can safely make best use of the resources available. Funding is important, as most noble Lords highlighted, but a range of factors will influence service quality and workforce capacity, including leadership, support and professional development, which the Government are addressing through our reform and improvement programmes. I add that while we have made good progress, there is more to do to create a sustainable social care system that stretches beyond any electoral cycle to provide world-class care and support for future generations.

I am checking to see if I have missed any questions. The noble Lords, Lord Kennedy and Lord Parekh, asked about the Return to Social Work Programme, which I will touch on. This has been supported by the Local Government Association, the DHSC, the DfE and the chief social workers, and it is particularly focused on areas experiencing recruitment challenges. We will look at how that goes as we move forward. I am now out of time, so if there are questions I have not answered, I will endeavour to write to noble Lords and ensure that they get answers.