World Social Work Day

David Simmonds Excerpts

Thursday 18th March 2021 Westminster Hall

[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered World Social Work Day 2021.

It is a privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg, as I move this motion in celebration of World Social Work Day and of Social Work Week.

In 1989, when the Children Act 1989 came into force, I was doing my work experience at the long-abolished Mid Glamorgan County Council, in the children’s services department. That was the first time in my life when I had an insight into the work of our qualified social workers, who help many of the most vulnerable in our society. For many of us in politics, it will have been through service in local government that we had the opportunity to see how their work can help to transform the lives of our constituents, often at their darkest moments.

Research across the UK indicates that even in those places where the most residents have some form of assistance provided through our social care system, fewer than one in five of the people we serve will ever, in the whole course of their life, come into contact with our care system. That is important, because unlike the work of the police service, our military, GPs and people who work in hospitals, most of our constituents will not come into day-to-day contact with what social workers do. That work is done with children at a difficult time in their lives, when they need professional intervention; adults with learning difficulties in particular who need support as they make their way in life; and people who are older, facing a period of frailty, who need to access the support of the state and for whom our social workers are often, genuinely, an emergency service.

Of course, we have to recognise that for a parent whose family is facing great difficulty, the knock on the door by a social worker is not a welcome moment in life. Far too often, there is a sense of fear and anxiety that it means the threat of their children being taken away, or of being held to account for what is going on in the privacy of their household. To people facing great difficulty in old age, social workers might be perceived as the gatekeepers telling them that they cannot access services, support and finance from the local authority, rather than as an aid to help. In the postbags that we Members of Parliament receive, that side of social work is often reflected.

When I consider my experiences in my time in local government, however, I remember the reprovision of a residential centre of adults with disabilities. The local authority and the team of social workers who knew those people—generally, adults in their 40s with Down’s syndrome—extremely well proposed a new way to give them independence, to provide them with support to live in their own homes, to access work and to travel independently. There was huge fear among the parents, many of whom had been told when their now adult children were very young that they would never grow up because of the limitations of the disease. They told me, “We are afraid that as a consequence of what is happening, our children will die.” I remember meeting some of those parents a year later, and they said, “I never realised that this young person I’ve been responsible for would be living independently, would have a job and their own front door, and would be travelling on the bus and the tube.” That was the crucial difference that good-quality social work had made to their lives. A professional approach, understanding what people can do and not what they cannot, and patient work with them brought about a transformational change in the circumstances facing those young people.

When we consider the huge growth in the numbers of children who are on child protection plans and are specifically referred to local authorities because of concerns, we can see the difference that good social work makes, especially if we look at the care system. The longer a child spends in our care system and the earlier they go into that system, the better their outcomes are—for example, children who are adopted at birth tend to have outcomes that are entirely in line with their peers. Where social work is not always able to make the difference is for those young people who may have spent a long time at home or in a chaotic family situation, where intervention comes late—perhaps in their teens—and where there is only a very short period to turn that situation around.

Again, we see the evidence that good social work can make a huge difference in the lives of children, young people, adults, and the elderly. For most of our constituents, the most frequent form of contact with social work is in old age, when there is the need to access services from a local authority, perhaps in preparation for discharge from hospital to ensure that a person is safe and able to return to their own home. For all these reasons, we can recognise that in our society today social work, while it is not as glamorous and it does not have a flashing blue light attached to it, is absolutely crucial to keeping our society together and providing support to people at their most vulnerable moment.

I put on the record my thanks to, and my pride in, the work of the social workers for whom I was responsible during my time as a lead member of Hillingdon Council. I also thank the British Association of Social Workers for the work that it does to raise the profile of social work and make sure that more people in our country gain an understanding of what it can do, in order to contribute to an informed debate, recognition of the importance of social work, and—in the context of parliamentary work—ensuring that, in concert with our NHS, we have a joined-up system that is properly resourced and able to fulfil the expectations that our residents have.

--- Later in debate ---

[David Simmonds]

I thank my hon Friend the Minister for focusing her speech very much on the people at the heart of what we are here to celebrate in our debate on World Social Work Day 2021. There is clearly a debate to be had about the complex social care system that we have in this country. We have heard from Members with direct personal experience. The hon. Member for Lewisham East (Janet Daby) spoke of her experience as a children and families social worker, the hon. Member for South Shields (Mrs Lewell-Buck) spoke of what she had seen in her community and in her career, and the hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Steven Bonnar) spoke of the aspirations he sees as deliverable through a more devolved model with greater local discretion.

There is an enormous challenge for social workers. As we recognise, on the one hand there is a sense of frustration at the bureaucracy that surrounds them in doing the job of helping families; on the other, there is huge criticism levelled at the Government should they seek to alleviate that bureaucracy. We therefore need to find a way to cut through when we consider the toxic trio—domestic abuse, mental ill health and substance misuse—that bring children into the care system. Some 63% of children in our care system are there because of neglect. Those are complex issues to tackle, so we need to ensure that there is proportionate regulation and guidance from Government, but that the social workers who know those families well—know their circumstances and their communities—can make decisions with them, for them, and sometimes without them, to pursue the best interests of the children and individuals at the heart of that.

I welcome the care review. Although around 3% of our population of 12 million children in the United Kingdom are in the care system, those children are the most vulnerable in our society, and, from the perspective of public services and the Government, the most expensive. On average, a high-needs placement to a local authority costs more than £130,000 a year per child. Although the picture, according to Ofsted, is of an improvement in the supply and quality of placements available for local authorities when they are making arrangements for children, the system, none the less, remains under significant pressure because children and frail elderly people form a much larger proportion of our population than they have in recent years.

Owing to that, we expect a proportional increase in the pressure on our social work services, and we need to respond. Over the years, numerous initiatives from central Government have been designed to achieve an improvement—not just for social workers, but in the outcomes for the people they work with. Quality Protects was the first that came to my attention, but there have since been many initiatives, under many Governments, of all parties, to improve the work done and the outcomes achieved for our most vulnerable children.

According to international comparisons, the UK has the best—the second best, on some measures—child protection system in the world. That is a system in which social workers—derided and often criticised in the press, and working in obscure areas—do a job that is genuinely world class and something we should be proud of. When I consider the Government’s investment in the What Works Centre for Children’s Social Care, I commend working directly with those who best-know families, adults, elderly people and children, and what they have done to bring about a transformation in outcomes—and how we can enable that more easily at national level. Social work, in particular for children, is the only area of local government spending that has risen in the last decade, as local authorities have chosen to strip spending in other areas to prioritise early intervention and child protection activities.

We go forward to ensure that our social care system—around half of which looks after adults of working age, not people who are frail and elderly—can work seamlessly with the NHS on issues such as hospital discharge and supporting people in their community, and, at the same time, is not ancillary to the acute and hospital sector, but part of the bigger picture effectively supporting people. The hon. Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall) made the point that social workers are the key leads for those individuals, and that is the right way to see it.

On World Social Work Day, I hope that watching social workers, senior managers and people with an interest in the sector have noted the strong sense of cross-party good will and desire for higher recognition of the professional contribution that social workers make, as well as the desire to improve the working environment—not just physically, but the requirements and regulations people work under—and the ability to act in the way necessary to transform the lives of the most vulnerable people in our country.

I shall finish where I started. Today is an opportunity to put on record our thanks and praise for social workers, recognise their contribution and ensure that what we have heard feeds through to the spirit of the care review, as we look at ways to make this system, which is already extremely high performing by international standards, even better in the interests of our constituents.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered World Social Work Day 2021.