Covid-19: Impact on Social Work

Cat Smith Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd March 2022 Westminster Hall

[Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the impact of the covid-19 outbreak on social work.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson. World Social Work Day was on 15 March, so it is perhaps timely to hold a debate in this House on the issue of social work. May I begin by wishing social workers everywhere, particularly in my constituency of Lancaster and Fleetwood, a belated but very happy World Social Work Day?

I see from my casework, as I imagine many other Members do from theirs, the amazing work that social workers do to support our constituents. Social work is one of the lesser-understood parts of our social care sector. Social workers come into people’s lives at difficult and challenging times, and there can be a negative association with them. When social workers are in the headlines, that is often because the worst has happened. When the worst happens, that sadly often means that a child known to social services has died.

When Arthur Labinjo-Hughes was murdered by the very people who were supposed to love and care for him, that was national news. Everyone wanted to know what events had led to that tragic incident and how it could be prevented from ever happening again. Some people were asking why social services could not save him, and why they could not save Star Hobson, who was also killed by the people who were supposed to look after her.

Most of the time, social workers are not in the news. I know an awful lot about social workers. In fact, I was brought up by one. My dad is a retired social worker, but he spent many years working for Cumbria social services in probation, child protection and, latterly, in his longest stint, the youth offending team. Although there are probably many cases in which my dad supported individuals but perhaps did not manage to turn their lives around, I want to tell the anonymous story of a school friend of mine who was in contact with me a couple of years ago. She said, “Your dad was my social worker. I had fallen in with the wrong crowd, but your dad helped me turn my life around. Now I am a mum, I work, and I no longer have a criminal record. I managed to do that with the support of your dad.” The story of my school friend would never make a story in a local paper, let alone a national, but that is the kind of work that social workers do in lots of different sectors. In particular, such cases involve supporting young offenders to turn their lives around.

Every single day, social workers carry out their roles. They support people with learning difficulties and autistic people. They work with unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. They carry out assessments and reviews, protecting people’s liberties and best interests. Social workers are integral to upholding human rights and child protection, but we cannot ignore the sphere in which social workers work.

[David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)]

I am grateful to the hon. Member for securing the debate. Will she allow me to place on record my thanks to those on the frontline of social work in Glasgow? In particular, I pay tribute to the social work team in Easterhouse in the East community addiction team in Parkhead. Before covid-19, many of those social workers had an enormous workload, which has only been exacerbated by several lockdowns. Does the hon. Lady agree that it is important that we listen to the voice of social workers on further support from Government as we emerge from covid-19, as their workload has undoubtedly changed?

[Cat Smith]

I thank the hon. Member for making that point. As a frequent visitor to his constituency, I know that his social work team in Glasgow do an amazing job supporting his constituents, and he is right to say that the voice of social workers needs to be heard by Government.

I have spent a lot of time with social workers over the years, some of whom have gone on to be elected Members of the House and who were then able to provide a platform for social work issues, and I have huge respect for the Members of the House who come from a social work background. One of the first MPs I met, Hilton Dawson, was a social worker before being elected MP for Lancaster in 1997. After Parliament, he went to work at the British Association of Social Workers, where I worked with him before being elected to the House. There is probably quite a nice symmetry in that, but I suspect that he is probably watching and wondering why it has taken me so long to get a Westminster Hall debate on this important issue. Indeed, given that his most recent political activity was standing in the Hartlepool by-election for the North East party, he has certainly been on a political journey, too.

The British Association of Social Workers is the professional organisation for more than 22,000 social workers in the UK. Its annual survey was carried out at the end of 2021, and the results were published just a few weeks ago. Social workers are on the frontline. They know their own profession and what they need in order to be able to fulfil their statutory and non-statutory obligations to a high standard. The Government should be listening to them.

In the survey, the three biggest challenges facing the workforce were determined to be the demands of administrative tasks, workload demand and adequacy of staffing. Nearly 5,000 family social workers left the profession during 2021—up 16% compared with 2020. How can we trust that we are doing the best by social workers if they are leaving the profession in such numbers and trying to do their job without departments being fully staffed?

High workloads and staff shortages will lead to current staff burning out. In many professions, burnout at work means that someone drops the ball on a deadline and perhaps one or two deadlines are missed, but a burnt-out social worker can be a matter of life and death for a child. It is not the fault of that social worker; the issue is the environment in which they work. Social workers do their very best to support people, so Government must do their very best to support social workers.

The pandemic did not only affect child safeguarding. The challenges facing care homes were also a key focus, but Government failed to bring forward many solutions. They only issued guidance and let care homes make their own decisions about visitors and testing, and that caused a lot of upset. Social workers reported that they were unable to access care homes. Social workers have a key safeguarding role, and residents’ family members and social workers facing access restrictions only heightened the worry about what was going on inside care homes.

How were people coping with the changes? Many care home residents, especially those with illnesses such as dementia, would not have understood why their family members were not visiting. That was never the right approach. I appreciate that the confusion in a pandemic can lead to some rash and ill-thought-out decisions, but it must never be allowed to happen again. Upholding human rights is not an optional add-on; it is a fundamental part of our social care system and should never have been restricted.

The pandemic also had an impact on people with learning disabilities and autistic people. “Do not resuscitate” orders were being issued basis solely on a person’s learning disability. That is a national scandal. Does the Minister understand the distress that those orders will have caused people? People with learning disabilities have, for a variety of reasons, much poorer health outcomes than the population as a whole. Along with other vulnerable and marginalised groups, people with a learning disability and autistic people bore a disproportionate weight of the impact of covid-19, including a greater risk of death.

This cannot be looked at simply in the context of the pandemic, either. We know from scandals such as that involving Winterbourne View care home that people with learning disabilities and autistic people are not always treated in the way they should be. The British Association of Social Workers’ “Homes not Hospitals” group campaigns on this, so will the Minister agree to a meeting with that group to talk about what the Government can do to get people with learning disabilities and autistic people out of hospital and back into the communities where they belong?

Social workers join the profession because they care deeply about society and the people within it, but social workers can do their job properly only if the Government are giving them the resources to do so. There needs to be proper funding for local authorities so that councils can invest in preventive measures. The cuts to local authority budgets affect social work, but also sectors such as youth work. I have secured many debates in the House on youth work and I know that there is sometimes, in some places, a bit of a tension between the youth work profession and the social work profession but, particularly for children in care, a strong working relationship between youth workers and social workers can really make the difference for a young person’s life outcomes.

We do not know whether there will be another dangerous strain of covid-19 or a new virus altogether that may force us into more restrictions on the way we live our lives, but we have to learn the lessons from this pandemic. Social work and social workers must be at the heart of recovery. It is a profession that is often hidden until someone needs the support of a social worker, but it is work that we could not be without.

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[Martyn Day (Linlithgow and East Falkirk) (SNP)]

I am managing not to laugh; I will do my best.

I am grateful to the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith) for securing today’s debate, which has been thoughtful and consensual. It is a worthy topic and I start by expressing my own gratitude to social workers for their outstanding work during these difficult times. They have continued to work tirelessly to support children, families, individuals and communities across a range of specialisms and services throughout the covid-19 pandemic.

I am grateful for the comprehensive and measured manner in which the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood outlined and opened the debate. It is a timely reminder to us all that, sadly, lives can be at risk when things go wrong, so it is vital that things do not go wrong and that social workers play a major role in helping to sort out people’s lives.

There are around 11,000 social workers registered with the Scottish Social Services Council. They are part of a social services workforce of over 209,000 people and are aligned to, but a different profession from, social care professions. Most work in local authority settings, across adults, children’s and justice social work. Registered social workers are also employed by the independent sector and may be self-employed independent social workers. They were all classed as key workers and admirably carried out their roles within the additional pressures of the pandemic climate. However, 77.7% of social workers interviewed by the British Association of Social Workers strongly agreed that working under lockdown had increased concerns around being able to safeguard children and adults. Concerns for the safety of women and children experiencing domestic abuse heightened over the pandemic. In some cases, lockdown and social distancing exacerbated already high-risk situations. It is deeply concerning that referrals to domestic abuse services increased during that period.

The Scottish Government are working tirelessly to ensure that frontline services continue to support adults and children experiencing gender-based violence, with £12 million allocated to tackle violence against women and girls. At the beginning of the pandemic, the Scottish Government allocated an additional £5.75 million to various organisations, including Women’s Aid and Rape Crisis Scotland, to support those providing frontline services to people experiencing the violence of domestic abuse, and to ensure that services could meet increased demand. Services, including national helplines, remained open during the pandemic, so that anyone who needed help could access them.

The Scottish Government have also committed to review the funding and commissioning of special services, with an additional twin focus on domestic and sexual abuse services. They recently launched the Delivering Equally Safe fund, inviting applications from public bodies and third-sector organisations. The fund provides up to £13 million a year from October last year to combat violence against women and girls.

Following the Scottish Government’s commitment in the 2020-21 programme for government, they published revised national guidance for child protection on 2 September. The guidance, which incorporates learning from child protection cases, supports improved cross-agency working and outcomes for children at risk. Local implementation of the guidance has been supported by a national group that is chaired by the deputy chief social work adviser. Chief officer groups oversee local public protection arrangements and the assessment and response to risk, vulnerability and protection across the 32 local partnerships.

The Coronavirus (Scotland) Act 2020 provisions were also developed to improve capacity and flexibility of local child protection processes and prioritisation of children at greatest risk. A local authority and Police Scotland data return, collected since April 2020, continues to be key to understanding how the pandemic is impacting on Scotland’s vulnerable children and young people.

While the Scottish Government have worked to protect social workers and those they serve, the UK Government’s requirements for mandatory vaccination of those working in care homes has forced valuable workers from the sector. The British Association of Social Workers issued a statement at the time warning of the dangers of the UK Government’s approach and expressing opposition. In my opinion, the UK Government should have followed the Scottish Government’s “educate and inform” approach to vaccination of care and social workers.

Social work relies very strongly on a human rights regime, which the Scottish Government have championed through working to enshrine the UN convention on the rights of the child and the UN convention on the rights of persons with disabilities in Scots law. The UK Government’s shameless attempt to prevent the enshrining of the UN convention on the rights of the child does nothing to protect the rights of children, and their plans to overhaul or overturn the Human Rights Act are a direct threat to social work, as has been highlighted in the British Association of Social Workers’ briefing. The UK Government should commit to supporting human rights and end their attacks on the Human Rights Act.

There can be no doubt that poverty is a driver of the need for social work interventions. As I have repeatedly called on the UK Government to make the £20 increase to universal credit and working tax credit permanent, it was disappointing that that was not done. The September cut to the £20 uplift has meant that millions of claimants suffered a £1,000-a-year cut, with only tapering to soften the blow. That cut is estimated to have pushed 60,000 people in Scotland into poverty, including 20,000 children.

[Cat Smith]

I am very much enjoying the hon. Gentleman’s contribution. I am glad he has raised the issue of poverty; that is one of the things I did not include in my contribution, but not because it is not important. Does he agree that it is important to understand the link between poverty and families needing support through social work, and that eradicating poverty would go a long way in easing many of the issues that we wish to address through social work?

[Martyn Day]

I agree entirely with the hon. Member. I am bringing my remarks to an end, and she has helped amplify my point, for which I am very grateful. On poverty, the British Association of Social Workers has commented in its briefing that

“it cannot be ignored that poverty will have wider repercussions, such as on social work.”

I will leave that thought as my final remark. I hope it helps focus the Minister’s response.

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[Gillian Keegan]

My hon. Friend raises an important point that we will address as part of the White Paper, “People at the Heart of Care”. It is important that we equip local authorities with the skills and tools they need to commission well in the market and to get the balance right between paying a fair cost for care while making sure that they get value for money for taxpayers.

[Cat Smith]

I welcome quite a lot of what the Minister is saying, and I hope that I am not straying beyond her brief. The complex issue with social work, of course, is that it crosses many Government Departments. While she is talking about the recruitment and retention of social workers, I would like to invite her to put on record her thoughts about why, particularly in child protection, a social worker tends to burn out a lot faster. People tend to go into child protection and then progress to different parts of social work. Would she share her thoughts on why child protection in particular seems to lead to such quick burnout for social workers?

[Gillian Keegan]

The hon. Lady makes an excellent point. Anyone who has met social workers doing that vital job, particularly in child protection, has nothing but admiration for the job they do. It is an incredibly difficult job with incredibly difficult choices that are highly complex and have a massive impact on families and individuals. It is a highly stressful job, but we need to do more to support people in the workplace so that they can deal with their mental health, talk to people and share their experiences. There is no doubt that it is an incredibly difficult job and one that is done very well, but every day they face enormous challenges and big decisions.

Finally, last November we announced a review of leadership in health and social care, led by Sir Gordon Messenger. The review will report in early 2022 and is considering how to foster and replicate the best examples of leadership. Strong leadership in health and social care will help to ensure the best outcomes for our key priorities, including, most importantly, improved care for patients and service users. The review aims to ensure that the necessary leadership behaviours, strategies and qualities are developed to maximise these efforts. We all know that leadership is vital in these key professions.

The hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood mentioned the work of the British Association of Social Workers and the “Homes not Hospitals” campaign to help more people to get the support that they need in their community, so that they can leave hospital. I completely agree with the desire to get more people out of hospital and getting the right care in the community. Indeed, we have an action plan, “Building the right support”, which we will be publishing in the not-too-distant future. I will be delighted to meet with representatives of the British Association of Social Workers to discuss this further.

Once again, I thank all hon. Members who have provided valuable contributions and insights today. It is important for the sector that we have this debate. We know, in our role as Members of Parliament, the work that we can do to highlight the fabulous work that people are doing. That does not always get highlighted, so this is a fantastic opportunity to highlight the complexity of the social work role and the variety of the role—the many different areas in which social workers provide vital support and the link to ensure that people get the right services from a load of different public services and get the wraparound care necessary for them.

The measures that I have set out today show that the Government are fully committed to supporting and developing the social work workforce—it is vital, and recognised as vital—as well as the wider health and social care sector. I thank everybody for their contributions and I look forward to continuing to work to celebrate this fantastic profession.

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[Cat Smith]

Thank you, Mr Robertson. I had actually forgotten that I would get to wind up, but I will take the opportunity to thank all hon. Members for taking part in this important debate. I know that it will be reported on in various publications and read by social workers across the four nations of the United Kingdom, and I think that the contributions by the Members present will be appreciated. It is fair to say that social workers often feel invisible or unrecognised and that the only time they get the spotlight is when, sadly, things have gone horribly and tragically wrong. However, this has been an opportunity, so close to World Social Work Day, to highlight the good work that social workers do.

I thank the Minister for agreeing to meet with the “Homes not Hospitals” team at BASW. If she would not mind, I would be delighted if I could join her at that meeting.

[Gillian Keegan]

indicated assent.

[Cat Smith]

There has been such a lot of agreement and consensus in this debate, and it has been an absolute pleasure to hear so many positive things said about social workers right across the United Kingdom.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the impact of the covid-19 outbreak on social work.