Social work warning over cost-cutting culture

Crucial government social service reforms are being threatened by cuts, according to Scotland’s leading social worker.
Sandy Riddell, the new president of the Association of Directors of Social Work (ADSW), said measures to improve services by integrating health and social care could be at risk in a cost-cutting culture which knows “the price of everything but the value of nothing”.

The Scottish Government published a bill in May to require health boards and local authorities to work better together in the provision of care in communities.

Ministers feel that encouraging more partnership working without legislating has not delivered results fast enough.

Similar moves will affect children’s services, criminal justice and public protection, Mr Riddell said.

However Mr Riddell said delivering closer working was even more difficult when budgets were tight and services under pressure: “It is always the activities that are best delivered on a partnership basis, or those which have a particular role in intervening early, which become the first casualties of cuts.”

As the director of education and social care at Moray Council, Mr Riddell has overseen closer working between staff from school and social work backgrounds. The irony is it can actually save money, he added.

“Departments are all trying to to square very challenging financial situations, often on their own. When budgets get really tight people can tend to focus on statutory interventions rather than early intervention.

“In fact, partnership can be a far more efficient way of achieving results when budgets are being cut. At the end of the day it is about making public money go where it should go.”

Speaking at ADSW’s annual conference, when he took over from former president Peter Macleod, Mr Riddell also acknowledged that the integration agenda has alarmed some of those in his profession, who fear that it could bring about a loss of identity for social work.

This fear comes less from frontline staff than from managers, he claims. “I think that some staff in Scotland are anxious that the unique identity of social work will get diluted or absorbed by other organisations.”

Far from it, he claimed. In fact, experience shows that greater integration leads to a greater understanding of the importance of social work, he argued.

“A lot of frontline staff do a brilliant job of working closely with their counterparts in other sectors. Sometimes middle managers and service leaders get anxious, perhaps because they have experience of other agencies being very territorial.

“But the way social workers look at people’s situations in the round make them far more adaptable to working with other organisations, funnily enough,” he said. “People from an education or health background can find it more difficult sometimes even to work with some of their own colleagues – because they are working in big complex organisations.”

Instead of seeing reforms as a threat, social workers should realise that closer joint working fits in with long-standing aspirations of many social services teams, Mr Riddell added.

“The thing social workers struggle with is helping vulnerable people connect with services that can support them. We are working often with difficult, challenging families who might have a range of issues around child protection, mental health, substance misuse, poverty and unemployment, for example.

“Connecting those services is what we’ve been trying to do in social work over a number of years.”

This is not to say there are not concerns about the impact of change, he said. The main fear he has is that changes dictated from the centre could lead to reforms themselves that don’t link up.

“It is important services are developed at the same time, with no new splits emerging at local level. I think civil servants in the Scottish Government understand this,” he said.

“This is an exciting time. There are worries and tensions, but also huge opportunities, and we have to be up for it.”

Mr Riddell had one more pledge to delegates at the conference: the association he heads is itself due for review. It is 40 years old and somewhat anachronistic, at least in terms of its name, as only 12 of Scotland’s 32 councils still have a dedicated director of social work.

“Structures look very different from the times when every local authority had to have a director of social work,” he said.

As a result he has launched a root-and-branch review of ADSW with the intention of publishing a 10-year vision at the beginning of next year.

“Future social workers and service managers will be doing things very differently and we need to give them leadership,” he said.