Tough times on the frontline – Ruth Cartwright, BASW

The message from government has long been that frontline services are sacrosanct and will be safeguarded from the impact of spending cuts. The reality, says Ruth Cartwright, British Association of Social Workers, England, manager, is very different

Many local authorities in England have attempted to safeguard social work posts, but the effects of cuts have been as much insidious as direct.

Social workers see the impact in their own workplaces and conditions of service, whether through the trend to freeze vacant posts or to slash car allowances – in effect, slicing over £1,000 from a salary already diminished by a zero per cent pay rise. Some areas have seen actual salary cuts, with whole departments having their contracts terminated and people offered new jobs with worse terms and conditions.

The consequences, however, are less about a social worker’s personal circumstances than the service they are endeavouring to provide to vulnerable children and adults in diminishing teams of less resourced, less motivated, more overworked frontline staff.

Despite the best efforts of some councils, diminished central government funding means that redundancies are not unheard of either, especially in adult services where the demand for social work skills continues to increase as a consequence of the recession and its causal hardship, as well as increasing numbers of older people and people with disabilities living longer.

Social workers were undervalued and de-skilled in adult services for some years as the care management role became reduced to 10-minute blocks of tick-box assessments of a person’s need and prescriptive one-size-fits-all care packages. This inevitably led to service users and carers not receiving all the support that a social worker could typically offer, such as helping someone come to terms with a disability and the changes that brings – time consuming but important work.

In England, and increasingly the rest of the UK, the personalisation agenda that emerged during the early part of the century was a reaction against this model, but has since become caught up in increasing bureaucracy and insufficient funding.

Crucially, personalisation has also become distracted by a move to nudge social work cost out of the picture, supplanted instead by unqualified staff less able to offer the sort of in-depth assistance many service users might benefit from. It remains far from clear to what extent the aims of people being treated as individuals, given control and able to receive support in the way that best suits them – a fundamental part of social work – can be met in the current model.

In children’s social work, the Baby P effect, arising from the convictions in late 2008 of those responsible for Peter Connolly’s death, continue to impact through increased child protection referrals. The number of children referred to social care services increased last year by almost 57,000.

The greater focus on vulnerable children is clearly welcome, but if the resources available to monitor and investigate referrals continue to be stretched then are children any safer than they were previously?

Positively, in children and families work there has been a real recognition by central government in England – and by a review undertaken by Professor Eileen Munro – that the bureaucracy practitioners are expected to grapple with needs to be radically refined. Currently, the evidence suggests that paperwork prevents social workers spending more than 20 per cent of their time with children and families, their days dominated by the same tick-box culture and the quest to evidence performance criteria which have little to do with good practice we see in adult work.

The capacity for Munro to secure real change, however, remains hugely limited in the current environment in which the notion of frontline staff offers no protection to back office clerical workers, with more resultant pressure on social workers. Evidence from a BASW survey of 400 social workers this year found over 90 per cent considered that lives were more at risk as a result of cuts.

And then there is the increasingly stringent eligibility criteria for care and support services, and new charges for previously free services. The level of need is now ever more critical before support becomes available, which means the interventions available are less likely to prove effective, and more likely to prove expensive – the great irony of the cost-cutting climate.

There are grounds for optimism, however. Research published earlier this year, for example, demonstrated the impact of social work has had on cutting child death rates over the past 30 years. Equally, we know those social workers who remain in the profession will persist in doing their best to support the most vulnerable in our society.

However, the public, media and policymakers must not be ignorant of the truth that frontline workers do this with continually reducing resources and against insurmountable odds.