Social Workers

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Wednesday 16th May 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, I begin by thanking my noble friend Lord Kennedy of Southwark for initiating this debate so well. I am disappointed that the debate has been so poorly subscribed today, especially as this is a subject of such great importance. But that is for reasons on which I can only speculate—maybe it is the end of the day, or maybe the European Union debate took up a lot of time. Had I not been able to participate in this debate myself, I think the debate would have been limited to the initiator of the debate and the spokesmen for three parties. I put down my name, but it is not a subject on which I am known to have done any academic work. It has interested me greatly, especially when I read Dr Ravalier’s report and had the occasion to meet social workers in recent months. I felt that the subject was of such great importance that I had to speak.

Social workers deal with all kinds of important issues: mental health problems, addiction, alcohol and drug dependency, family breakdown and so on. Think of almost any human frailty or human weakness and they are expected to deal with it. They give life to people and they even attempt to heal broken selves. For a profession engaged in this kind of activity, the questions are: why is it under so much stress and why is it not content with the kind of work it is doing?

Here I will make a very simple point. It is not just that social workers are under stress. Everybody is under stress. There is no job I can think of that is stress-free. In a world like ours, anything we do is always going to subject us to stress. What is peculiar to social workers is a certain kind of stress: stress brought about by a combination of certain kinds of factors. These are the factors that Dr Ravalier highlighted and I want to highlight as well.

Several of these factors are worth mentioning. The first, of course, is the sheer amount of work. As the report points out, 92% of people work more than they are contracted for and that amounts to 10 extra hours per week. Secondly, the working conditions are not satisfactory. Social workers share computers, they may share desks, and they work with very little managerial guidance. Thirdly, the inflexible working hours mean that not many of them are able to work from home. Fourthly, social workers do not enjoy respect or the kind of managerial and institutional support that they are entitled to expect. Fifthly, clinical supervision on a regular basis is not available.

It is also rather disappointing that the profession is not valued as highly as other professions of comparable social significance. A graduate careers survey about two years ago showed that 73% of final-year students knew little about social work and had not even considered it as a possible career option. Then of course there is the bureaucracy which bedevils all areas of life; for example, where there is a 40-minute visit to a child and three hours spent filling in the paperwork. In addition, social workers carry the blame when things go wrong even though they themselves are not to blame.

In combination, all these factors—excessive hours, poor working conditions and inadequate recognition and appreciation by people outside—lead to a low sense of self-worth and that generates a degree of stress where one is struggling to do things and unable to produce results. If social workers could hope that things will get better, the stress might be less, but there is no hope that things are getting better. There are the public sector job losses, the climate of austerity and, if I remember correctly, the demotion of the Children’s Minister to Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State. All these factors have combined to block off any kind of future hope for improvement in their condition.

What do we need to do? Here the report has a few ideas and other reports have come out over the years which have had many interesting ideas as well. If you put them together, you would get a wonderful programme. I am not going to talk about the programme. In the few minutes that I have, I will talk about four ideas that I think worth pursuing.

First, no profession can generate a sense of pride or self-worth unless it is valued by its peers and its contribution to society is widely appreciated. Therefore, there should be a publicly supported campaign to raise the profile of the profession. This can be done not only by highlighting what the profession does and the contribution it makes to society but by cherishing and valuing the contributions of different social workers to different areas of life.

The second thing that needs to be done—the House of Commons Select Committee report talks about it—is the creation of a professional body for social work. That will help raise the quality of leadership, regulate the performance of social workers and raise the profile of the profession.

Thirdly, there is also a strong necessity for co-operation with universities, with universities training social workers and providing benchmarks for what training is needed for a social worker at what stage.

Fourthly and finally, it is very important that public authorities should find ways of finding and retaining staff. That is not easy. It requires a lot of things. It requires that people do not have to work longer hours than they need to, some hope that salaries will be better than they were last year, and the kind of climate in which one is valued and can hope for better conditions to come.

I hope the Government will take into account the many suggestions that have been made—not just by me and my noble friend Lord Kennedy—and that the Minister will respond to the question of what the Government intend to do with plans to promote a public campaign about the profession, set up a professional body and find ways of retaining people within the profession, especially the younger ones.