World Social Work Day

Emma Lewell-Buck Excerpts

Thursday 18th March 2021 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields) (Lab) [V]]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg, and to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Janet Daby).

It will come as no surprise that I will focus my comments today on children’s social workers and the constant, dangerous attempts by the Government to dismantle children’s social care services so that they are ripe for private takeover. Social workers know that once that happens, profit becomes the overriding principle and care becomes an afterthought or an add-on. We have seen that in adult social care, and we are already seeing it in fostering and residential children’s care, where vast profits are made for shareholders on the backs of vulnerable children and adults.

In 2017, the Government proposed allowing local authorities, under the guise of innovation, to opt out of protective legislation for children. After a groundswell of cross-party objection inside and outside this place, the changes comprised in a whole chapter of the 2017 Act were removed at the 11th hour. In 2019, the then Minister disseminated a dangerous “myth busting” document advising local authorities to dispense with statutory guidance in relation to the most vulnerable children. That attempt to deregulate and wipe away hard-fought-for protective legislation for children was eventually quashed, and the document was withdrawn.

Last year, shamefully using the pandemic as an excuse to force through deregulation once again, the Children’s Minister with the stroke of a pen wiped away protective legislation for children through the Adoption and Children (Coronavirus) (Amendment) Regulations 2020—statutory instrument 445 of that year. Despite efforts from across the House to scrap that dangerous statutory instrument, it remains in force today. It is no coincidence that nearly 80% of social workers have reported to the British Association of Social Workers that throughout lockdown their concerns about safeguarding vulnerable adults and children have increased, and that early intervention and help is not readily accessible.

Recently, the Government commenced their long promised once-in-a-generation review of children’s social care. That review that is already shrouded in controversy and immense hurt and upset has been caused to those in care and the care experience community by the outright rejection of hundreds who applied to share their valuable views and insights into the care system. The independence of the chair has rightly been called into question—a chair who never opposed the attempts from 2017 onwards to deregulate, and who has already produced a blueprint for children’s social care that slants towards deregulation which was developed in isolation from those who receive or have experience of care. The chair has no professional background in social care at all.

The appointment led in February this year to a letter signed by a wide range of respected organisations expressing those concerns, as well as concern about the rushed timescale of the review, and requesting that it be conducted in a more inclusive, collegiate way. Since then it has been revealed that the review’s recommendations will be formulated working alongside people with a financial background and Government Departments. Also, the recommendations, crucially, cannot be predicated on any extra funding at all. Social services do not exist in a vacuum. What happens in wider society impacts more acutely on the profession than on others. Millions of children live in poverty and destitution, the attainment gap is growing supportive services are being dismantled and the number of children in care is at a 10-year-high of nearly 80,000, yet the Chancellor made no mention of the £800 million gap in children’s social services in his Budget.

Social workers are rightly worried about their future and the welfare of the children they work with if local authority public sector children’s social services are further eroded, replaced or diminished, and the current model is outsourced for a profit-driven one. Social workers have been the forgotten workforce throughout the pandemic, but they have remained strong in the face of attacks on our profession and in the face of those who aim, as the Government do, to diminish and trample over our core values and principles of social justice, respect and integrity.

Social workers are the bravest, strongest and most principled people I know. I want them to keep making a difference and keep changing the world. I know that most of us in this place will never see or fully understand what they do—but I do. I have images and stories etched in my mind and heart that haunt me and will stay with me for ever. I promise social workers and the families that they work with that I will always be their champion in this place.