By Dymphna
A personal view of the social work scene The local authority Social Services Departments are going to get a bad press during the next year or two This seems quite certain, because of the attitudes and activities of certain Members of Parliament. There appears to be quite a vogue nowadays for Members to open debates, ask questions and make speeches not so much for their impact on the floor of the House as for the amount of press coverage they will earn - and the press always seems ready to oblige. Overready to oblige,#one feels sometimes; the newspapers seem to reflect only what goes on in Parliament instead of disagreeing or tackling the same subjects in different ways or ever really developing any particular attitude of their own.
Anyway, there are a large number of MPs who are already baying away like sonorous bloodhounds about shortcomings in the social services, and if these bayings have so far been publicised mainly in the social work journals, nevertheless, a good many have found their way into the popular dailies. We may be pretty sure that the press are slowly being brought around t0 the idea that it is fashionable and profitable to Publicise gaps, shortfalls, errors of commission and m?re particularly errors of omission in the Social Services Departments.
Two questions seem to arise from this. Will the bad press be deserved? And even if deserved, ought there to be any publicity at all?
It may be helpful first of all to list the statutory duties which have poured like a torrent upon the Apartments; for I cannot remember quite such a sPate boiling and foaming upon one Department, unless it happened to the Education Departments in tlle first decade of this century (and the mass-media Were not well developed then).
There are: Firstly, the Local Authority (Social Services) Act, 1970. This was the amalgamating Act, ^ud it is only slowly coming into effect. It was said *n Parliament that this Act would not cost anything, but the costs are already terrific, partly financial the diseconomies of size are already self-evident - and partly emotional - the pains of disorientation are acute. Vast amounts of time, money, energy and emotion are being dissipated in such tasks as devising common case histories, common card indices and common filing systems. From the client’s point of view, nothing is performed better now than ir was before amalgamation.
Secondly, there is the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act, 1971. This is the one the parliamentarians really got worked up about. ‘What are the local authorities doing?’ they wailed. ‘They need imagination. They need drive. They need publicity. The handicapped must be served!’ The local authorities had no social workers to spare. With the best will in the world to do something, they had nothing to do it with.
Thirdly, there is the Children and Young Persons Act, 1969. Quite apart from its philosophical basis to encourage a radical re-appraisal of the treatment of delinquent and deviant young persons - it automatically transferred to social workers a large number of chores previously performed by the police, the probation officers and the managers of Approved Schools. A medium-sized authority can reckon this year to spend an extra ?10,000 in travelling expenses and lose 2,000 social-worker hours to such jobs as escorting offenders up and down the country.
Fourthly, there is Section 45 of the Health Services and Public Health Act, 1968. This empowers local authorities to develop a fully comprehensive service for old people - something which has come not a moment too soon when one considers the vast number of very frail, very elderly people who now survive in the community by the barest margin, and the speed with which that number increases annually. The care and welfare of the aged is the Himalaya of the social services.
Fifthly, there is the Nurseries and Child Minders Regulation Act, 1948 as amended by Section 60 of the Health Services and Public Health Act, 1968. This is not a new Act, but the duties the local authority is obliged to carry out are to be carried out by social workers rather than Health Department personnel. What is clear is that the nursery playgroup movement is expanding phenomenally: registration of new groups alone, let alone their surveillance and the encouragement of higher standards, will need more workers than ever will be transferred from the Health Department.
Finally, as if all this was not enough, the Government have decided virtually to rescuscitate the Mental Health Act of 1959; and the red-covered pamphlet, Better Services for the Mentally Handicapped, with its Alp-like statistics showing thousands and thousands of mentally handicapped persons being transferred from hospital to local authority care, tells its own story without any lily-gilding by me.
Here are six major pieces of legislation, any one of which could easily absorb the total resources of a Department - in money, in time and in manpower; yet in addition the Departments have many other services still to develop - for the gipsies, the homeless, deprived children, families at risk, the deaf, the blind, the poorly-housed, the emotionally impoverished. And the social casualties for whom these services are designed all have their own support groups and pressure groups. Those who are keen on the welfare of the blind are already worried about a dilution of the service. Those who want more help for gipsies are unlikely to be satisfied by the answer that more help is going to the chronically sick; and those who make impassioned pleas for the severely sub-normal will only become more impassioned when they hear the vigorous cries of those who want greater provision for the homeless.
So, in effect, the Social Services Departments are being pressed to be masters of all trades when in fact they are jacks of none. Try as they may, they cannot possibly meet the demands nor satisfy the pressure groups. Indeed, the more they try the more errors they will commit: they are already being badgered into building and opening more homes and centres before anybody has sat down to work out where the staff are to come from. Short-staffed, panicky establishments inevitably drift into scandalous situations where patients are ill-treated and regimes become ossified.
So a bad press is assured; and I do not think it will be deserved. In fact, ‘deserved’ and^ ‘undeserved’ seem to be irrelevant words: the Departments have been given a superhuman task when they are not manned by superhumans but by earnest, worried, devoted little officials.
It seems all wrong to me that at this juncture Members of Parliament should continue to whoop it up as they are doing. ‘The local authorities must wake up!’ they shout. ‘We must publish league tables showing which are the “good” authorities and which the “bad”! We must prod, we must chivvy, we must expostulate, we must at all times prevent anybody from ever settling down!’
This sort of approach is not only extremely unfair to the local authorities but does positively more harm than good; because the publicity inevitably creates a widespread opinion that provided everybody shouts loud enough, the social services will expand so that everybody’s problem will be taken care of by somebody else. Even people who never thought they had a problem will look around for one; worse still, those people who were coping with problems competently enough will suddenly realise that they ought not to be, because their local authority is a “bad” one. Instead of concentrating on caring, they will concentrate on chivvying. So that really, all these loud shouts about caring are inevitably creating an uncaring society.
I cannot expect parliamentarians and publicists to lay off the social services, but I think I have the right to expect that they will be altogether soberer, statesmanlike and sympathetic than they have been so far.
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