Study: Exploring social work’s ability to promote social inclusion

This paper uses a service evaluation of a city-wide Advocacy Rights Hub, based in a northern-English city, as a vehicle to explore the shift in welfare provision away from regulated state welfare to the deregulated voluntary sector in circumstances of diminishing welfare resources in the UK.

It focuses on two significant trends relating to welfare that are exposed through the evaluation. The first is how social policies are increasingly directed away from addressing the needs of the socially excluded in low income communities.

The second and related issue is how these policy trends have led to the ascendency of advocacy and shrinking of statutory social work.

Advocacy services are undoubtedly less regulated and less professionally qualified than statutory social workers but, unlike social workers, they promise not only to hold up a torch to people needing advice (a role still believed by many to lie with social workers), but also to shine it on unmet need, failures in service provision and discriminatory practice.

Are UK social workers content to accept the limitations on their part in these endeavours, or are they prepared to work towards facilitating change that will enable them, alongside advocates, to help redress social injustice and inequality for the socially excluded in low-income communities?