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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Contemporary social work cannot be understood without an appreciation of the broader context of social policy in which it takes place. Such an understanding is increasingly important as social workers are expected to work across institutional, professional and even national boundaries in new ways profoundly affected by the changing global context.
This insightful book examines how shifts in the dominant political ideology have affected the nature of welfare provision, the kinds of social problems addressed by policy, and the balance of responsibilities for well-being between individuals, the family, voluntary organizations, the market and the state. It explains the impact of these developments on the organization of social work and on relationships between social workers and service users. The book discusses contested concepts central to social work – such as justice, liberty, equality, difference, need and risk – and illustrates these through a range of examples.
The critical analysis provided in this book offers students of social work a crucial foundation for negotiating difficult and sensitive practice situations and defending their profession, providing them with the tools and knowledge to uphold key professional values.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Acronyms and abbreviations
Introduction
What is social work?
What is social policy?
The structure and logic of the book
1 Tracing the Roots of Welfare and the Evolution of Social Policy and Social Work
1.1 Introduction
1.2 Origins of state provision of welfare: from the Elizabethan Poor Laws to the late 1800s
1.3 From the Poor Law to the welfare state:1900–1948
1.4 The post-war welfare consensus: 1948–1979
1.5 Thatcherism and the Conservative governments: 1979–1997
1.6 The New Labour governments 1997–2010
1.7 The Coalition government, contemporary welfare issues and the place of social work: 2010–2015
1.8 Conclusion
Discussion questions
Further reading
2 Welfare Ideologies, Social Policy and Social Work
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Liberalism and neoliberalism
2.3 Conservatism and neo-conservatism
2.4 Marxism and socialism
2.5 The Third Way
2.6 Welfare states in context: comparing welfare regimes
2.7 Evaluating the impact of politics and welfare ideologies on social work
2.8 Conclusion
Discussion questions
Further reading
3 Social Problems and Social Work
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Epistemological debates
3.3 Consensus and conflict theories of society
3.4 What are social problems?
3.5 Early perspectives on social problems
3.6 A social constructionist approach to social problems
3.7 Social work and social problems
3.8 Conclusion
Discussion questions
Further reading
4 Social Justice, Citizenship and Equality
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Citizenship and rights
4.3 Social divisions, difference and inequality
4.4 Equality
4.5 Key social justice theories
4.6 Social work, justice, equality and difference
4.7 Engaging with difference
4.8 Conclusion
Discussion questions
Further reading
5 How Social Work is Organized: Institutional Arrangements and Governance
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Institutional arrangements: Seebohm and after
5.3 New public management and marketization
5.4 Ways of working: joined-up government, partnership and interprofessional working
5.5 Service quality and performance management
5.6 Austerity, local government cuts and pressures on social work
5.7 Social work as a profession: education, training and professional regulation
5.8 Conclusion
Discussion questions
Further reading
6 Social Work in Practice: The Interface between the Individual and the State
6.1 Introduction
6.2 Need and risk
6.3 Risk, intervention and social work
6.4 Evidence-based practice
6.5 Empowerment and personalization
6.6 The changing relationship between the social worker and the client/service user
6.7 Conclusion
Discussion questions
Further reading
7 Social Work and Globalization
7.1 Introduction
7.2 What is globalization?
7.3 Social problems arising from economic globalization
7.4 Supranational institutions and governance
7.5 Professional networks and epistemic communities
7.6 Conclusion
Discussion questions
Further reading
8 Conclusion and Bringing it All Together
8.1 What can social workers do?
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Social Policy for Social Work
Placing Social Work in its Wider Context
LORRAINE GREEN AND KAREN CLARKE
polity
Copyright © Lorraine Green and Karen Clarke 2016
The right of Lorraine Green and Karen Clarke to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2016 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978–1–5095–0662–0
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Green, Lorraine Carol, author.
Social policy for social work : placing social work in its wider context / Lorraine Green, Karen Clarke.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978–0–7456–6082–0 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 0–7456–6082–7 (hardcover : alk. paper)
-- ISBN 978–0–7456–6083–7 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 0–7456–6083–5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Social service--Great Britain. 2. Social policy. 3. Public welfare--Great Britain. 4. Great Britain--Social policy. I. Clarke, Karen, author. II. Title.
HV245.G864 2016 361.6’10941–-dc23
2015024620
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
A number of people have helped us by commenting on draft chapters of this book. We would like to thank John Churcher, Ros Day, Sue Ferris, Caroline Glendinning and Nick Turnbull. Anna Churcher Clarke and Kirstein Rummery gave advice on specific issues. Thanks are due to the anonymous academic referees who reviewed the book for Polity and made some useful suggestions, and to Guy Davies, a Social Work MA student at Manchester University, who read the manuscript and gave us valuable feedback from a student perspective. Jonathan Skerrett, our editor at Polity Press, was both patient and encouraging, and Leigh Mueller was a meticulous and speedy copy-editor.
Acronyms and abbreviations
ADASS
Association of Directors of Adult Social Services
ADP
anti-discriminatory practice
AMHP
Approved Mental Health Professional
AOP
anti-oppressive practice
APPG
All Party Parliamentary Group
APSW
Association of Professors of Social Work
ASBO
anti-social behaviour order
ASYE
Assessed and Supported Year in Employment
BASW
British Association of Social Workers
CAF
Common Assessment Framework
Cafcass
Child and Family Court Advisory and Support Service
CAMHS
Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services
CCETSW
Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work
COS
Charity Organization Society
CPD
Continuing Professional Development
CQC
Care Quality Commission
CQSW
Certificate of Qualification in Social Work
CTO
community treatment order
DCLG
Department for Communities and Local Government
DCSF
Department of Children, Schools and Families
DfE
Department for Education
DFES
Department for Education and Skills
DH
Department of Health
DP
direct payment
DV
domestic violence
DVLA
Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority
EBP
evidence-based practice
EC
European Community
ECHR
European Convention on Human Rights
ECtHR
European Court of Human Rights
ECJ
European Court of Justice
ECOSOC
Economic and Social Council of the United Nations
EHRC
Equality and Human Rights Commission
ESPN
European Social Policy Network
EU
European Union
FGM
Female Genital Mutilation
GDP
Gross Domestic Product
GP
General Practitioner
GSCC
General Social Care Council
HCPC
Health and Care Professions Council
HR
Human Resources
IASSW
International Association of Schools of Social Work
ICS
Integrated Children’s System
ICSW
International Council on Social Welfare
IFSW
International Federation of Social Workers
IGO
International Government Organization
INGO
international non-governmental organization
JUCSWEC
Joint University Council Social Work Education Committee
LA
local authority
LCSB
Local Children’s Safeguarding Board
MP
Member of Parliament
NGO
non-governmental organization
NHS
National Health Service
NICE
National Institute for Health and Care Excellence
NPM
new public management
OECD
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
Ofsted
Office for Standards in Education
ONS
Office of National Statistics
OU
Open University
PA
personal assistant
PCF
Professional Capabilities Framework
PFI
Private Finance Initiative
RCT
randomized controlled trial
SCIE
Social Care Institute for Excellence
SCR
Serious Case Review
SES
socio-economic status
SEU
Social Exclusion Unit
SOP
Standards of Proficiency
SWTF
Social Work Task Force
TCSW
The College of Social Work
UDHR
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
UK
United Kingdom
UN
United Nations
UNCRC
United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child
UNHCR
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
UNICEF
United Nations Children’s Fund
USA
United States of America
VAT
Value-added Tax
WHO
World Health Organization
WTO
World Trade Organization
Introduction
The role of social workers and the kinds of problems they work with are shaped by the broader policy context they work within. This policy context is in turn the product of political decisions based on competing ideas about the nature of society and what role the state should play in meeting the needs of its citizens. The context for social work practice is, however, not confined to the nation state, as developments at a supranational level also affect the social policies of individual nations. Globalization has undermined the control which individual governments can exercise over the economy, with implications for employment, for how need is categorized and met, and for the resources available to be spent on welfare services. International treaties and conventions – such as the European Convention on Human Rights, or the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of the Child – and the requirements of EU membership – such as equality legislation – create new rights for citizens and obligations for governments, which are also relevant to social work practice. This book aims to give social work and social policy students, practitioners and educators a critical understanding of social work in the UK and the issues which it currently faces, by placing it within this broader political, economic and social policy context.
The first section of this introduction briefly examines what social work is and how it has changed over time in terms of its role, professional status and location. The second section examines social policy, its permeable and contested boundaries and its relevance for social work. The final section explains the structure of the book and briefly summarizes the different chapters and their contents.
What is social work?
Social work in the UK originated in nineteenth-century philanthropic and state responses to the increasingly visible social problems associated with working-class poverty in the context of accelerated industrialization and urbanization. These responses took a number of different forms. From the 1870s, in a precursor to casework, the Charity Organization Society (COS) worked with individual families to support them to help themselves out of poverty. A different kind of philanthropic activity, exemplified by the Settlement Movement, which began at around the same time, emphasized the potential of social action and a collective response to social problems that foreshadowed a community work approach within social work. Finally, the administration of the Poor Law by local government involved the assessment of individuals and families in terms of their eligibility for state support and the management of institutions such as the workhouse which catered for destitute people.
Professional social work in the twentieth century developed out of these antecedents in tandem with the evolution of the British welfare state in the period following the Second World War when social workers became state employees, mainly employed by local authorities. However, social workers also continued to work in the voluntary (third) sector, which has in recent times once again come to play a more significant role in delivering social work services, as has the private, for-profit sector. Social workers today are routinely found in a variety of voluntary, charitable and community organizations, and also in private residential care homes for the elderly and commercial fostering and adoption agencies. The great majority are, however, still state employees, employed primarily by local authorities and healthcare trusts.
While social work has always been concerned with meeting the needs of individuals and families, it has always also had a controlling function. The work of the COS was concerned with differentiating the ‘deserving’ from the ‘undeserving’ poor, in order to ensure that support was only provided to the ‘deserving’, and in this way was involved in disciplining the ‘undeserving’. Contemporary social workers may have to control or police parents in order to ensure the well-being of children, or restrict the freedom of people with serious mental illness in order to protect them or other people. In exercising these dual roles of care and control, social workers have to balance the needs and interests of different individuals in relation to one another in ways that require careful professional judgement and draw on a range of disciplines and theoretical perspectives.
Social workers work with many different groups – children and young people, older adults, physically disabled people, people with learning disabilities, mentally ill people, refugees and asylum seekers – and also with a wide range of different kinds of problems – abuse and neglect, poor parenting, alcohol and other substance misuse, mental illness and disabilities of various kinds. The kinds of circumstances that require social worker involvement and the interventions that they make depend on a whole range of factors, including:
what is identified as a social problem (for example, when does the unhappiness of an individual child become a public ‘problem’ of child neglect, requiring intervention by social workers?)
how the social problem is understood (for example, is it seen as a problem arising from an individual or from a social deficit?)
what other forms of informal social support are available (for example, social care services for frail elderly people will be less necessary in cultures where multigeneration households are the norm, older people are respected and women’s role is primarily domestic)
what other kinds of formal state or voluntary-organization services are provided and how they are funded. These services may complement social work intervention or reduce the need for it (such as services offering parenting support, or support for those affected by domestic violence, or providing respite care for disabled family members to help their carers).
The way in which social workers intervene depends both on the model of change that is dominant within the profession at a particular historical time, and on the broader political and policy climate within which social work is practised. Payne (1996) identified three alternative orientations to social work practice: (i) individual–reformist, in which social work forms part of welfare services and is concerned with meeting need and improving services; (ii) reflexive–therapeutic, in which social work tries to promote individual psychological growth, self-development and self-realization; and (iii) socialist–collective, in which the focus is on empowering oppressed peoples and challenging structural inequalities. British understandings and practice have mostly allied themselves with individual–reformist and reflexive–therapeutic perspectives, although these three perspectives are not necessarily incompatible (Lymbery 2005).
Changes in the economic situation and in prevailing ideologies and political agendas have led to changes in ideas about the roles social workers should perform and the tasks they should undertake, and what kinds of knowledge social workers require, and how this should be applied to practice. The emphasis on individual casework that focused on need, which characterized social work from the 1950s to the 1980s, has given way to a concern with risk management, which has seen local authority social workers, particularly in adult social care, increasingly concerned with care management and brokering services for clients, rather than directly delivering services themselves.
There have also been important changes in how the recipients of social work interventions are conceptualized. The families and individuals whom social workers engaged with were once seen as relatively passive clients who were expected to defer to social workers. Service users nowadays are seen as consumers who should be given choices about the services they receive and whose views should be fully taken into account. Clearly, there are limits to this, engendered by both resource constraints and social work’s ‘control’ role – for example, where child protection or serious mental illness are concerned.
Placing these changes in social workers’ roles and in their relationships with service users in the broader context of the developments in social policy over the same period helps to explain why the changes occurred, and offers social workers the intellectual tools to question and challenge current policy and practice, when these appear to conflict with the profession’s ethical commitment to social justice.
What is social policy?
‘Social policy’ refers broadly to those government policies designed to address a range of human needs, such as housing, education, subsistence and health. Which needs and problems are the responsibility of the state and how best to address them are questions that have been, and continue to be, the subject of intense political debate. Furthermore, the boundaries of what constitutes ‘social policy’ are hard to define. Many different aspects of social organization affect well-being and needs – for example, measures to reduce crime or address problems such as obesity, domestic violence or relationship breakdown. Policies on income redistribution through direct and indirect taxation – the rates of income tax which individuals should pay, and the level of VAT (Value-added Tax) and the range of goods and services on which it should be levied are also important in determining the number of people living in poverty, for example. Should they be regarded as economic or social policies?
Wilson et al. (2011: 41) argue it is imperative for social workers to be aware of how social policies impact upon their work, the organizational contexts in which they are placed and their relationship to other professions. Social workers need to be able to evaluate both the potential impact of social policies on practice and the evidence put forward to support particular policies and then decide how to respond. For example, changes in policy relating to child protection practice and social work education from the 1980s onwards have been strongly influenced by highly publicized cases of children dying at the hands of their parents or carers. These cases have often resulted in crude, dichotomized media representations, followed by public inquiries which have scapegoated social workers. The public sentiment that such cases evoke, whether inadvertently or deliberately generated, has led to policies that are based on a small number of atypical tragic cases (sometimes just one), rather than an informed evaluation of standard and/or more successful practice. Child deaths have been repeatedly linked to the same kind of problems, such as insufficient communication between different professionals and organizations, which suggests that changing social policy or practice responses to this have not been successful (and perhaps could never be wholly successful in eliminating all risk).
Since the 1990s there has been a strong policy emphasis on performance measurement, leading to the introduction of standardized procedures and rigid timescales, using information systems as a way of introducing greater control and accountability of services. Standardization in this way was also intended to be a way of ensuring greater equity of service across different geographical areas. These measures have contributed to social workers sometimes taking dangerous short cuts – for example, by conducting superficial assessments that are heavily dependent on evaluation by other professionals, in order to conform to policies and regulations (Broadhurst et al. 2010b).
Front-line practitioners may also respond to social policies in ways that aim to thwart policy goals. However, such subversion can sometimes, paradoxically, have the opposite effect. The extent to which social workers are able to resist centrally prescribed policies has, however, been constrained by the imposition of these new managerial practices adapted from business models, and an associated audit culture. Nevertheless, neither the need nor the opportunity to exercise individual discretion can ever be totally eliminated. Social workers therefore need to understand that social policies have both intended and unintended consequences, may be ambiguous and are often filtered through many different organizational layers, each with different interpretations of and responses to the same policy.
There have been suggestions from some authors since the 1980s that social workers do not need to study wider social theory and social policy, discrediting these as biased ‘idealistic left-wing dogma’ (Brewer and Lait 1980; Lavalette 2014). The commentators responsible for such claims often present social work as a purely practical profession. At the same time, they stress the need for high entry requirements and resilient practitioners, implicitly acknowledging that social workers operate in complex, dynamic and high-risk situations which require multidisciplinary knowledge, competent inter-agency working and excellent communication and analytical skills. These confused statements present contradictions which perhaps can only be understood and dealt with by having a broader understanding of social policy.
The structure and logic of the book
This book aims to provide social workers and social work students with the knowledge and skills to be able to understand social policy critically, as well as how it shapes the form and direction of social work. It adopts a critical, analytical approach, exploring different political and philosophical positions and ways of viewing important concepts, such as equality and social justice, to give students and practitioners some options about what they take from this book and how they might use this knowledge to inform their practice. Although the individual chapters can be read and understood on their own, each chapter also builds on the preceding chapters. The questions for discussion at the end of each chapter can be used by individual students to reflect on and consolidate what they have learnt, or utilized by seminar leaders or lecturers to structure small or large group discussion. Students can also be directed to the additional reading material listed or invited to link the questions to specific case studies to enhance the discussion further.
Chapter 1 locates social work in its wider historical context. It looks at the socio-political conditions which shaped the beginnings of the state’s involvement in welfare provision in the UK and traces how professional social work developed in tandem with the expansion of the welfare state from the 1950s to the 1970s. It examines the consequences for the welfare state and for social work of the changes brought about by Thatcherism, New Labour’s Third Way and the 2010–15 Coalition government.
Chapter 2 focuses on the different political and philosophical perspectives, or welfare ideologies, that shaped ideas about the welfare state, such as Marxism, conservatism and neoliberalism. Longstanding cultural and ideological differences have resulted in different ways of organizing welfare states across the industrialized and post-industrialized world, dividing them into distinctive kinds of welfare regimes. These produce rather different outcomes – for example, in terms of socio-economic disparities, gender equality and wider population health and well-being. Different welfare regimes have different conceptions of citizens’ entitlements, and of the role that social work and other associated social professions can play in helping people to reach their potential. Comparisons with welfare regimes in other countries offer a useful perspective on the organization of social welfare and social work in the UK. These comparisons therefore not only illuminate the current situation in the UK but show the potential for positive change, how that might be achieved and structured, and its potential effects.
Chapter 3 addresses how particular issues come to be identified as social problems and illustrates how different understandings of social problems and their causes lead to different ideas about the appropriate solutions. Social change may result in the disappearance of a social problem – for example, ‘illegitimate children’ – or the appearance of new problems, such as the care of an ageing population. Other problems, such as child abuse, have become much more broadly defined; others may disappear and then re-emerge, but be represented differently each time – for example, the ‘deviant’ potential of young working-class men. The chapter shows how what might be taken to be an objective social problem may actually not be one, while other issues may remain unrecognized as social problems. Although a number of perspectives on social problems are described and explored, social constructionism is presented as offering the most helpful approach to understanding social problems.
Chapter 4 examines a number of concepts central to social work, such as citizenship, rights, equality, diversity and social justice, and traces the links between them as well as disputes surrounding their meaning and appropriate deployment. It evaluates how these concepts are used by social workers in the context of anti-discriminatory or anti-oppressive practice, using case examples to illustrate the knowledge and skills required to work effectively with difficult and highly sensitive social work situations.
Chapter 5 focuses on the changing institutional location of social work and the systems in place to manage it, within and across organizations. It examines the impact of the marketization of many services and the implications of this for inter-agency partnership and inter-professional working, which have become important policy priorities. The effects of current service quality and performance management techniques are considered, as is the impact of the financial crash in 2008 and of the 2010–15 Coalition government’s austerity policies which followed. All of these developments have had important implications for social work as a profession, and we discuss their impact on professional education, training and regulation.
Chapter 6 examines social work in practice in terms of the interface between the state and the individual. It traces the shift from responding to need, which characterized much early social work and welfare state provision, to an emphasis on risk, which currently determines eligibility for access to many social work services. We examine the rationale for and ascendance of evidence-based practice in social work, and the types of research methodologies and knowledge favoured by policy makers. Following this, concepts and practices associated with service user empowerment are discussed, exemplified by the personalization agenda in adult social care. We consider the consequences of the dual emphasis on risk and empowerment for the relationship between service users and social workers.
Chapter 7 positions UK social work within an international context and explains the impact of globalization – technologically, culturally, socially, politically and economically – on social work both internationally and in respect of individual countries. It examines how globalization has given rise to new problems in which social workers have a role to play – such as migration and the position of legal and illegal immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees – as well as highlighting the contribution of migrants to different countries’ social work and social care workforces and the global chains of care which migration creates. We show how global capital investment in care services as profitable businesses creates new kinds of local problems in a marketized system of care. The chapter discusses the importance of supranational organizations such as the European Union (EU), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the UN, and their role in shaping the social policies of individual nations. It shows how the attempt to build a global profession has to address differences in knowledge and cultures both within and between nations, and differences in power and resources, particularly between the Global North and South.
The concluding chapter summarizes the key issues addressed in the book and makes some suggestions about how social workers individually, and as a profession, can use the analysis presented here to support them in defending social work and continuing to pursue its goals of responding to need and promoting social justice, equality and human rights.
1Tracing the Roots of Welfare and the Evolution of Social Policy and Social Work
1.1 Introduction
As the Introduction showed, there are important links between social work, social policy and the welfare state. The welfare state was established in the period immediately after the Second World War, but state involvement in meeting need goes back much further. Social work has been an important part of welfare provision since the nineteenth century, although it only came into existence as a recognized profession in the post-war period, as part of the welfare state. This chapter provides a historical analysis of the development of the welfare state and social work’s role within it, to show how social work’s evolution has been shaped by the broader social policy context in which it is placed.
1.2 Origins of state provision of welfare: from the Elizabethan Poor Laws to the late 1800s
The state has been involved in meeting need, particularly poverty as a consequence of old age, disability or unemployment, for centuries. The 1597 and 1601 Poor Laws provided for individual parishes to levy local taxes and use the money to ‘set the poor on work’, maintain those unable to work and place pauper children as apprentices (Harris 2004: 113). However, state involvement in addressing a variety of social problems increased rapidly in the nineteenth century in response to the consequences of the industrial revolution, particularly the problems associated with accelerated urbanization. The large-scale migration of people from the countryside to the towns to work in the newly established factories generated new kinds of problems, such as mass disease and poverty, which were increasingly seen as requiring state intervention.
The 1834 Poor Law and increasing state intervention
The system of parish poor relief introduced in the 1600s was inadequate to deal with the scale of poverty that accompanied industrialization and urbanization in the nineteenth century. Poverty was also more visible in urban areas than it had been in more dispersed rural communities, and responses were at least partly linked to middle-class fears of social unrest as well as being a humanitarian reaction to need (Howe 2009). A new Poor Law was introduced in 1834 which instituted a national Commission to establish the rules for the management of the poor throughout England and Wales. One issue of great concern to the Commission, which continues to preoccupy policy makers today, was how to ensure that the provision of support to the poor did not undermine work incentives. The problem was ‘solved’ in the Poor Law by the principle of ‘less eligibility’, under which those capable of work should only be offered support ‘in kind’ by being accommodated in the workhouse, where they would have shelter and food, and be required to undertake productive work, and where conditions meant there was every incentive to leave as soon as possible, so that entering the workhouse would be a last resort.
Underpinning this approach was the view that poverty amongst those capable of work was an indication of personal fault and moral inadequacy (Whiteside 2012: 117). This led to the belief that it was possible to differentiate the ‘deserving’ poor, who were clearly the victims of misfortune as a consequence of illness, accident or old age, from the ‘undeserving’ poor. This latter group were seen as having brought their difficulties on themselves by their laziness or immorality. Within the workhouse families were broken up, with men, women and children separated from each other, and, in order to promote desirable characteristics, good behaviour was rewarded with extra food, or greater comfort. This gradually led to the development of more specialist institutions: hospitals for the sick, asylums for the mad, and various kinds of educational institutions for children (Thane 1996: 35–6).
Other problems arising from industrialization and urbanization led to some state regulation of living and working conditions. Factory legislation was introduced from the 1840s onwards, first to restrict women’s and children’s employment, and later to regulate men’s working conditions. The huge influx of population to the cities and the unregulated building of housing to accommodate the working class resulted in periodic epidemics which affected not only the working class, but also the middle class. From the mid nineteenth century onwards, legislation was passed to control building standards and provide sanitation (Harris 2004). The need for a better-educated working class led to the introduction of state funding for education, and, from 1880, compulsory education up to the age of ten.
These state measures were important in seeking to provide certain minimum welfare standards for the population, but private charity and mutual self-help also played an essential role in welfare provision throughout the nineteenth century. The expansion of the middle class as a direct consequence of industrialization, combined with the growth of evangelical Christianity and the existence of large numbers of middle-class women with no opportunity for employment other than in charitable work, resulted in a mushrooming of philanthropic activity. Schools, hospitals, health visiting, housing for the poor, orphanages and many other forms of welfare support were provided through large numbers of local charities. At the end of the nineteenth century, it is estimated that about £8 million a year was dispensed through charities in London alone – an amount which exceeded the total national Poor Law expenditure (Thane 1996: 21).
The role of charities and self-help
In 1869, in an effort to impose some kind of order on the proliferation of charitable effort, the COS was set up by a group of philanthropists, drawn from a new professional middle-class elite which included doctors, lawyers, civil servants and their wives. They were concerned that charity was being dispensed in a haphazard way that did not promote moral improvement amongst the poor. They established a system of home visiting to ensure that charitable help only went to those who were capable of becoming self-supporting. Those responsible for administering the Poor Law also enlisted the help of the COS by passing lists of paupers on to them. Charles Loch, the leader of the COS from 1875 to 1913, personally schooled COS workers, known as ‘trained social physicians’, in assessments, case recording and later in applying psychology to their work (Howe 2009). This ‘scientific charity’ involved a rigorous analysis of the applicant’s lifestyle, habits, morality and character, and produced an action plan with attached recommendations. For those deemed ‘deserving’, this might include material support and continuing casework which combined friendship and surveillance but was intended to be temporary, individual and reformatory (Woodroffe 1962). This individual casework can be seen as an early form of social work (Seed 1973).
Families who received help from the COS were able to remain living in their local community, rather than entering the workhouse. The COS visitor sought to analyse the families’ problems and help them find a lasting solution which would restore their independence (Thane 1996: 21–3). This approach essentially individualized the problem of poverty, rather than seeing it as a structural consequence of the economic cycle. It was also inherently paradoxical as those denied assistance and seen as undeserving might have the greatest need for help, whereas those who received support were seen as more respectable and provident and arguably had less need (Lymbery 2005). The terminology also later changed from ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ to ‘helpable’ and ‘unhelpable’, and although this change suggested a less moralistic and more objective approach to the poor, it was actually more damaging because it suggested not just that some individuals were not worthy of support but that they could not be helped at all.
Despite the COS’ rather discriminatory moral ethos, social work’s ‘best practice’ philanthropic origins embodied a commitment to social inclusion (Forsythe and Jordan 2002), albeit a very conservative one in which the rich had a Christian obligation to help the poor improve themselves, with the ‘welfare subject’ generally seen as subordinate to the ‘welfare provider’ (Simpson and Connor 2011: 10). ‘Scientific charity’ was additionally based on principles of honesty, commitment and empathy (Forsythe and Jordan 2002), still evident in contemporary social work.
The University Settlement Movement was another significant development in late nineteenth-century philanthropy. It represented a different approach to addressing poverty, and pre-figured an alternative approach within contemporary social work – community development. The Settlement Movement took the view that both the state and charity had a role to play in promoting social harmony, and that the relationship between middle-class philanthropists and the working class should be one of mutual respect, rather than middle-class condescension and exploitation. The settlements recruited young university graduates to live and work in poor areas, sharing the benefits of their knowledge and education and using their skills to solve social problems (Thane 1996: 23; Hugman 2009).
Self-help and mutualism were also important sources of welfare provision. Friendly Societies, open mainly to men from the skilled working class, offered insurance against sickness and old age. Trade unions played an important part in providing health, old-age and unemployment benefits for members. The Co-operative movement provided relatively cheap, good-quality food and other necessities. All these forms of assistance, however, failed to provide significant support to the poorest members of the working class, whose employment was intermittent and who therefore did not have the resources to join a trade union or the Co-operative movement (Thane 1996: 25–30).
The inadequacies of the dominant nineteenth-century explanation of poverty, and of self-help, charitable and Poor Law provision as a system for dealing with it, were demonstrated by Rowntree’s survey of poverty in York in 1899. This showed that many households whose members were in work nevertheless had insufficient incomes to meet even basic needs. The consequences of this for national well-being were dramatically revealed when it proved impossible to find sufficient ‘healthy’ numbers of recruits to fight in the Boer War. Of those who volunteered, 40 per cent were found unfit to serve because of poverty-related poor eyesight, rickets and other chronic health problems (Harris 2004: 156). Government anxiety about the implications of this ‘national deterioration’ for the future of the Empire and for Britain’s economic competitiveness relative to other emergent industrial nations, such as Germany and the United States, promoted support for greater direct state involvement in welfare provision. Political pressure also came from the trade union movement and from the newly formed Labour Party.
1.3 From the Poor Law to the welfare state: 1900–1948
The welfare measures introduced by the 1906–14 Liberal government established a much greater role for the state in meeting social needs, and moved away from the principle which dominated the nineteenth-century approach to poverty: that individuals were entirely responsible for their circumstances, and that provision to relieve poverty should be on the basis of its being a stigmatizing last resort (Digby 1989). Anxiety about national deterioration resulted in legislation to allow local authorities to provide school meals, a school medical service and maternal and child welfare clinics in an effort to improve the health of the next generation of working-class children. Other important welfare measures included the introduction of old-age pensions, funded out of taxation, and an insurance system to provide for unemployment and medical care, to which employers, the state and the workers themselves contributed. By the eve of the Second World War in 1939, middle-class self-interest, working-class pressure through the trade union movement, and an increasing voice for the working class through the Labour Party had changed the political and ideological climate, so that problems which had, in the nineteenth century, been seen as the result of individual weakness and failings, came to be understood as originating also in aspects of the social structure. Action by the state to moderate some of these structural effects was increasingly widely accepted by all the political parties, though to differing extents, particularly in the wake of the international consequences of the 1929 Wall Street crash in the USA and the mass unemployment which followed this in the 1930s. As a result, there was limited state provision for some of the contingencies of life: unemployment, illness, old age were all provided for to some extent. Children’s health and education were seen as a joint responsibility of parents and the state. Nonetheless, provision was far from universal, and the stigma associated with the Poor Law remained.
Just as the Boer War had precipitated a crisis about ‘national deterioration’ which, combined with the growing political strength of the working class in Britain, brought about significant changes in the accepted role of the state, so the experiences of the civilian population of Britain in the Second World War and government responses to the crisis which the war precipitated, resulted in a further shift in the role of the state in providing for the needs of its citizens. The extent of poverty in big cities was revealed in new ways to middle-class Britain when children and expectant mothers were evacuated from London and other major cities at the start of the war and billeted with families in the countryside, in anticipation of a possible aerial bombardment campaign.
The anticipation of air raids and civilian casualties required a major reorganization of hospital services, revealing the poor standards in public hospitals and creating pressure for reform after the war. Food shortages led to state intervention through rationing, to ensure that limited resources were fairly distributed, which produced a significant reduction in health inequalities and an improvement in the standard of public health. These wartime experiences demonstrated the necessity and desirability of state intervention to address a variety of social problems, and stimulated demand for change in welfare provision after the war. Underpinning this was an acceptance of the need for collective rather than individual solutions to social problems.
The Beveridge Report
As part of the government’s planning for the post-war period, Sir William Beveridge chaired a committee to look at the future provision of social insurance benefits (financial support in the event of unemployment, illness and old age). His report, published in 1942, set out a comprehensive plan for the reform of state welfare provision, to address what he called the five giant evils: Want (poverty), Disease (ill health), Ignorance (educational inequality), Idleness (unemployment) and Squalor (homelessness / poor housing). These were to be addressed through a comprehensive and universal system, offering protection from poverty and its effects ‘from the cradle to the grave’.
The report’s recommendations had extensive popular support and were largely implemented by the Labour government elected immediately after the war. The legislation marks the beginning of the modern welfare state in the UK. Other sources of welfare dominant in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – philanthropy, trade unions and Friendly Societies – did not disappear, but the state became the principal source of both funding and delivery of welfare support.
The key measures introduced were:
A comprehensive social insurance system for all (male full-time) workers providing cover against unemployment, industrial injury, sickness and old age, for themselves and for any dependants. Employees, employers and the state all contributed to the scheme. Although the intention was originally that the level of benefits should cover subsistence needs, this aspiration was never realized in practice.
A ‘safety net’ means-tested national assistance scheme for those who fell outside the new national insurance scheme. It was anticipated that this would gradually disappear as the proportion of the population covered by the national insurance system grew.
A universal system of family allowances to contribute to the costs of child-rearing.
A national health service providing universal healthcare free at the point of delivery, replacing the patchwork of voluntary, charitable and poor law hospitals and private general practitioners which had developed over the preceding 150 years. It was hoped that, as the health of the population improved through the various welfare measures introduced, the demands on the health service would gradually reduce.
Universal, free secondary education up to the age of fifteen.
A public programme of house-building. The Labour government promised to build 4–5 million new homes, with local authorities playing a major role.
The Beveridge Report was underpinned by a commitment to maintain full employment through the adoption of Keynesian economic policies. This meant state involvement in managing the demand for labour, spending money on capital projects during periods of economic downturn to create employment and prevent economic recession.
The cost of this increased state expenditure on welfare was met through taxation. The tax threshold had been lowered during the Second World War, and although it was raised again after the war, wage rises and inflation meant that an increasing proportion of the population became tax payers. Whereas, at the start of the twentieth century, someone on the median wage was below the tax threshold, and there was widespread support for income taxation, by the 1970s someone with a wife and two children, earning less than half of male full-time average earnings, was liable for tax. As a result, popular attitudes to taxation changed significantly (Harris 2004: 300).
1.4 The post-war welfare consensus: 1948–1979
From the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s there was considerable political consensus (i.e. agreement from all political parties/persuasions) about the need for greater state involvement in welfare provision, and during this period the range and level of services provided by the welfare state gradually expanded. Contrary to the hope and expectation that better and more universal welfare provision would reduce the need for the welfare state, as the health and well-being of the population improved, the welfare budget continued to increase.
In 1965 a survey by Brian Abel-Smith and Peter Townsend revealed that, despite the welfare state, the number of people living in poverty had increased from 600,000 in 1953–4 to 2 million in 1964. There were several reasons for this growth in poverty: the Beveridge national insurance system assumed a ‘male breadwinner’ family – a male head of household employed full-time over his entire working lifetime, providing for a dependent wife and children. The system did not provide well for single or divorced women, for households where the man had low-paid or intermittent employment, or for people with long-term illness or disability, and it did not allow for the costs of housing. National insurance benefits had not kept pace with inflation during the post-war period. As a consequence, many households were dependent on the ‘safety net’ national assistance benefits to supplement their national insurance entitlement. This provided only a minimum subsistence-level income and left households in poverty.
The beginnings of state social work
Personal social services were not addressed directly in the Beveridge Report, possibly because Beveridge thought that, if poverty, unemployment and sickness could be controlled by the rational planning of economic production and distribution, the need for social work would wither away (Parry and Parry 1979). To the extent that psychosocial needs remained, these were not seen as having anything to do with the fundamentally economic strategy of the welfare state. Social work therefore appeared more as an afterthought than as a central element in the original welfare state plan, but its importance became more evident after the death in 1945 of a child, Dennis O’Neill, killed by his foster father. This led to a government inquiry, the Curtis Committee, in the following year. The committee concluded that the existing legislation and services catering for deprived children were seriously inadequate and recommended that every local authority should have a Children’s Committee overseeing a department consisting of a chief officer and trained social workers who could investigate neglect and abuse and place children in the care of the local authority whenever necessary. The 1948 Children Act gave local authorities responsibility for children whose parents were either ‘unfit’ or unable to care for them, and for supervising adoption. Policy before this had concentrated on organizing work placements and apprenticeships for orphans and disadvantaged children (Denney 1998). The introduction of direct state responsibility for the protection of children made the needs of children a central concern and represented a major shift in social attitudes to the state’s responsibilities towards children (Hughes 1998: 150). The 1947 Younghusband Report also recommended increasing social worker numbers through cultivating a reliable knowledge base and developing university courses that combined practical training and social science knowledge (Davis 2008).
The legislation which established the post-war welfare state distributed responsibility for services that had previously been covered by the Poor Law to different departments within the local authority and to the newly established health service. Three separate local authority departments were created to undertake social work with different groups in the population: (i) children’s departments for children who were denied a ‘normal’ family life; (ii) welfare departments to work with elderly, physically handicapped and homeless people; and (iii) local health departments to deal with mentally ill people and the ‘mentally handicapped’ (Cree 2008). In addition, local authority education departments developed their own welfare provision to address the educational needs of disabled children, deal with truancy and provide free school meals, clothing and educational maintenance allowances to poor families. These different local authority departments came under the control of different central government ministries, leading to a ‘chaotic’ national picture (Hall 1976: 6), with three different central government departments responsible for welfare services for different populations, and with overlapping responsibilities within local authorities and local health departments.
The Seebohm Committee
During the 1950s and 1960s, expenditure on services for these different groups grew more rapidly than public expenditure generally. The recommendations of a number of government departmental enquiries into specific service areas during the period converged on a common theme: the importance of early intervention and prevention. In the context of a shift from seeing social problems as the result of individual failure to seeing them as resulting from social and family pressures, much greater emphasis was placed on community work and work with families. This in turn demonstrated the need for much better co-ordination of the various fragmented services that had developed in the post-war period to serve specific client groups such as children, elderly people and those with mental health problems or disabilities. There was concern about the numbers of vulnerable and isolated elderly people in the community (Dickens 2011), and about the fact that families with multiple problems did not know where to go for help. Some therefore ended up receiving support from different professionals situated in different organizations in different locations who did not communicate with each other. A lack of coherence within social work was also evident from the existence of five different bodies that approved or provided both university and non-university social work training which varied in quality and length. Although most courses were supposed to provide generic training, the majority of students were either funded by or recruited for a particular service or client group, meaning that students did not receive a sufficiently broad education (Dickens 2011).
In 1965, the government established a committee under Lord Seebohm to look at local authority and allied personal social services. The Committee recommended the establishment of a single social services department in each local authority to provide a comprehensive family service, with a body of generically trained, professional social workers, to replace the different services delivered by people with varying amounts of professional training in the existing fragmented system. The report envisaged a joined-up community service offering ‘one door to knock upon’ (Stevenson 1999: 85). The recommendations were implemented in the Local Authority Social Services (England and Wales) Act 1970. Similar measures were introduced in Scotland in the Social Worker (Scotland) Act 1968, following the 1965 Kilbrandon Report. State funding for statutory social services meant they became the principal service providers for all client groups and this arguably marks the beginning of social work as a unified profession. The various professional associations for social workers came together in 1970 to form the British Association of Social Workers (BASW), and in 1971 the Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work (CCETSW) was established, responsible for a new generic social work qualification (Dickens 2011).
This legislation brought social work out of the margins of the welfare state into the mainstream. The 1970s are generally acknowledged as the high point of social work (Rogowski 2010), with the Seebohm Report a seminal moment in its evolution. Politically and professionally, the personal social services became a fully recognized fifth pillar of the welfare state with a legislative base, professional recognition, and functions funded and endorsed by the state. The Seebohm Report additionally dispelled some of social work’s lingering associations with stigma, paternalistic charity and the COS. Despite this, the personal social services still occupied an ‘odd’, indeterminate category within the welfare state as they dealt with heterogeneous needs not easily incorporated into health, education or social security, ranging from protecting children to supporting the vulnerable elderly to remain in their own homes (Spicker 2008: 114).
The Seebohm Report argued for the importance of social services in promoting the capacity of communities to identify solutions to their problems through citizen participation and voluntarism, locating community development within social work. This vision of a community-based service opened the way for community work to achieve greater recognition as an alternative method to casework, echoing the earlier role of the Settlement Movement (Thomas 1983: 19–25). The concern with prevention and early intervention in relation to juvenile crime, which had prompted the settingup of the Seebohm Committee, also gave a new importance to youth work, whose aim was to provide young people with social education to support them in the transition to adulthood (Jeffs and Smith 1983). Youth and community work, after a brief flourishing in the early 1970s, succumbed to the changes in political ideology and the financial climate during the later part of the decade and in the 1980s. This is discussed in section 1.5. The Barclay Report in 1982, which examined the roles and tasks of social workers, argued for a holistic and community-based approach to social work, alongside counselling and social care planning, but reported at the worst possible time politically and financially, and its recommendations were completely ignored by the Conservative government.
Developments during the 1970s
The 1970s were a period of economic, political and social upheaval in the UK and globally, resulting in an end to the political consensus that had enabled the expansion of the welfare state during the preceding twenty-five years. A four-fold increase in the price of oil led to inflation, and the decline of traditional UK manufacturing industries meant rising male unemployment, while expansion of the service sector of the economy and changing attitudes to gender roles saw women’s employment increase. Keynesian economic policy, involving increased government expenditure to counteract high levels of unemployment, did not appear to be able to address the economic problems that the UK faced. In 1976, as a result of the oil crisis, the government was forced to borrow from the IMF. One of the conditions of the loan was that there should be substantial cuts in public expenditure. Welfare expenditure as a proportion of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) fell sharply in 1976–9 (Burchardt and Hills 1999: 29), and the increasing cost of the welfare state, funded by high levels of taxation, began to be called into question.
Demographic change challenged some of the assumptions that underpinned Beveridge’s system of national insurance. Long-term male unemployment combined with women’s greater economic independence and rising levels of divorce meant that the male breadwinner family that was the basis of the national insurance system no longer corresponded to social reality. Men no longer had the certainty of continuous full-time employment during their working lifetime. Women could no longer rely on a husband to provide for them and their dependent children, or on a husband’s contributions to provide them with a pension in their old age, because marriage was increasingly likely to end in divorce. Falling fertility and increased life expectancy meant that rising numbers of elderly people were dependent on welfare services funded from the tax contributions of a shrinking number of people of working age. At the same time, the continuous expansion of the welfare state in the post-war period led to increased expectations. The women’s (feminist / sex equality) movement and anti-racism and disability movements in the 1960s and 1970s challenged existing roles and prejudices and gave political voice to oppressed minorities, who demanded recognition and social change.
Political responses from both the left and the right were critical of the welfare state, albeit for different reasons. Right-wing politicians presented the welfare state as inefficient and a drain on the economy, and claimed that state regulation and high taxation were inhibiting economic growth. The welfare state was seen as creating dependency, and discouraging initiative. Collective solutions were rejected in favour of individualism. Critiques from the left identified the welfare state as a bureaucratic and paternalist institution that upheld the professional interests of those who worked in it rather than those of the people whose welfare it was meant to promote. It was seen as a means of social control, through the requirements placed on those using state welfare services. Feminists and disability activists drew attention to the ways in which the welfare state discriminated against and stigmatized certain groups and reinforced patriarchal institutions.
For social work, developments in the 1970s meant that its role and professional status became increasingly aligned with the growth of the British welfare state, but this also constrained it (Bilton 1979). The stigma attached to welfare still lingered, and the individualistic way social workers performed their role obscured the societal causes of many problems. Like other welfare professionals, social workers adopted a paternalist deficit model in which clients were the passive recipients of their professional expertise. The welfare state was assumed to be inherently beneficial and social workers took for granted its continued growth. These attitudes and assumptions came under increasing criticism and challenge from the new social movements emerging in the 1970s.
1.5 Thatcherism and the Conservative governments: 1979–1997
The election in 1979 of a ‘New Right’ Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher committed to ‘rolling back the state’ marked the start of a new era in the history of the welfare state. The welfare state was seen as (i) economically damaging because it interfered with the free market and placed an unnecessary financial burden on the state; (ii) socially damaging because it rewarded and perpetuated dependence, undermining individual, family and community responsibility and creating a welfare-dependent underclass; and (iii) politically damaging because it allocated unnecessary roles and responsibility to government.
Keynesian economic policy was abandoned and the government’s economic role was identified as controlling inflation rather than maintaining full employment. Unemployment rose to record post-war levels, reaching over 3 million in 1982, as the result of the collapse of old manufacturing industries (Timmins 2001: 386). The government, pursuing neoliberal economic policies (see chapter 2), cut taxes and tried to cut public expenditure. However, unprecedentedly high unemployment, an increasing elderly population and the growth in the number of lone parents (many dependent on social security benefits because of the difficulty of combining paid employment with caring for children) meant that welfare spending constituted a higher percentage of government spending than ever towards the end of the Conservative administration (Burchardt and Hills 1999).
State services were seen as bureaucratic and inefficient, and the government
