World Social Work Day

Liz Kendall Excerpts

Thursday 18th March 2021 Westminster Hall

[Liz Kendall (Leicester West) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. I congratulate the hon. Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds) on securing this important debate on World Social Work Day. He will not know it, but my parents grew up in Pinner, so I know at least part of his constituency fairly well.

I start by thanking the 100,000 social workers in the United Kingdom, including 320 in Leicester, the city that I am extraordinarily proud to represent. I thank them for their hard work, passion and commitment over all the years, but especially during the horrors of the covid-19 pandemic.

Social workers work at the heart of our communities to support millions of people, in order to improve those people’s chances in life. They work with people who have learning disabilities, autistic people and children at risk. They support families where there is domestic abuse and mental illness, and those people who do not have the mental capacity to make their own decisions. That means that social workers can be found across many different sectors and many different services, from residential care homes to hospitals and children’s homes, and in local authorities, charities and the community.

As my hon. Friends the Members for Lewisham East (Janet Daby) and for South Shields (Mrs Lewell-Buck) have already said, social workers have faced huge extra pressures during the covid-19 pandemic, which come on top of a decade’s worth of cuts to local council budgets— £8 billion pounds has been removed, putting extra pressures, stresses and strains on social workers, who were already reporting burnout and stress.

As many hon. Members have said, the latest survey from the British Association of Social Workers has clearly demonstrated concerns that more people need help and support from social work, but also that it is much harder to get help and support, especially—this is absolutely critical—the up-front early intervention and preventive care and support that is so crucial to prevent problems from getting even worse and ending up in an emergency, which is not good for families and actually ends up costing the taxpayer far more money. In particular, the survey showed that almost eight out of 10 social workers say that they are increasingly concerned about safeguarding children and vulnerable adults during lockdown. That is a real concern as we begin to emerge from the pandemic. What are we going to do? Where is the plan and strategy to tackle and deal with those issues that we know have been building up during lockdown?

To add to those points, social workers in Leicester say how isolating working from home has been during our year-long lockdown—in fact, in Leicester we have never been out of lockdown—and how much they have missed their colleagues. Those relationships are vital, both professionally and personally. To deal with the problems caused by lockdown, social workers have also had to be benefit advisers, furniture finders, and food bank directories. They feel undervalued compared with organisations such as the NHS, the police and the other services that the hon. Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner mentioned, when they are all trying to work as one system and one team across so many different organisations. In future, we really need to focus on the importance of identifying strengths in families and communities, rather than focusing only on deficits and problems. I think that is something that we in politics could all learn from, quite frankly.

In the rest of my speech, I will focus on the three really big issues that we need to tackle in order to improve the lives of our constituents and the lives of people with whom social workers work day in, day out. First, we urgently need to tackle rising rates of poverty, particularly child poverty. The vast majority of parents in poverty are doing their very best to support their children, but for those who are already struggling, poverty makes things much harder. In reality, even before the pandemic struck, more than 4 million children in this country were growing up in poverty, including 12,000 in my constituency alone. Once housing costs have been taken into account, more than 40% of children in Braunstone, Abbey and New Parks are growing up in poverty.

Since the pandemic struck, more than 2,500 children across Leicester have had to claim free school meals. The number of people claiming universal credit has doubled, and there has been a 300% increase in the number of people using food banks, as I know only too well from my role as chair of Feeding Leicester—I know that my hon. Friend the Member for South Shields is really involved in the Feeding Britain organisation. They are not just people who out of work; they are in work but on very low incomes, and they just cannot afford to put food on the table.

We are seeing some appalling examples of the levels of need in our city from the work that we have been doing on our winter grant. Increasing numbers of people need help with the absolute basics of living, such as food and paying for their gas, electricity and water, and we have had an increasing number of claims for duvets that people can put on their beds and for coats to put on their children’s backs. In the 21st century, in one of the richest countries in the world, that is a national disgrace, and it does not have to be that way.

The last Labour Government lifted more than 1 million children out of poverty, and President Biden’s covid recovery plan in the US will halve child poverty—that is absolutely essential. If we want to build back a better future for our country, and if we want to level up in every part of the country for all our constituents—especially those with whom social workers work day in, day out—tackling child poverty must absolutely be a priority. I look forward to hearing the Government’s plans on this issue when the Minister responds.

Secondly, I want to focus on a point that has rightly been made by the British Association of Social Workers: an unacceptable number of people with learning difficulties and disabilities are still in hospital settings and assessment and treatment units because there simply is not enough support in their home communities. The association says that must be a priority for the future, and I agree.

It has been 10 years since the appalling scandal of Winterbourne View, when the BBC’s “Panorama” programme exposed the shocking, and indeed criminal, treatment of people with learning disabilities in that institution. At the time, 3,400 people with learning disabilities were in long-stay institutions. The Government promised more than half of them would be moved into the community by 1 June 2014, yet by November 2014 the Government had failed to achieve that—there were still 2,600 people in these hospital units. I vividly remember that, because it was the first ever urgent question I asked as the shadow Minister for Social Care.

The review by Sir Stephen Bubb called for urgent action to tackle this problem, which the Government again promised to deliver, this time by 2016. At the time, I said that the missed deadline was a total disgrace, and that I feared Sir Stephen Bubb’s review risked gathering dust alongside all the other reviews. I am sad to say that this has proved to be the case, despite all the promises and all the reviews. I say to the Minister that despite the Government’s Transforming Care programme, in September 2020 the CQC found that there were still more than 2,000 people with learning disabilities in assessment and treatment units. Many are subjected to, “undignified and inhumane treatment, including prolonged seclusion and unnecessary restraint”.

This is one of the worst examples of a failed policy that I have seen in more than 25 years of working in the health and care sector. We need leadership, grip and focus from Ministers and NHS England. Crucially, we need the views of people with learning disabilities and autism, and the views of their families and social workers, to drive fundamental and lasting change. I hope that the Minister will set out what the Government are doing and will continue to do in order to tackle this issue.

Finally, there is an urgent need for the Government to bring forward longer term plans for reforming social care—an issue we talked about just minutes ago in the previous Westminster Hall debate. More than 19 months ago, on the steps of Downing Street, the Prime Minister promised to fix the crisis in social care with a plan he had already developed. That plan is still nowhere to be seen. There was nothing in the Budget on these vital long-term reforms. The Minister says that the Government will bring forward these plans this year, but that is what she promised last year. I hope that when she stands up she will set out why we should believe that it will be different this time around.