are being slashed and the Budget made a mockery of any notion that ‘we’re all in this together’. Our fi nancial plight seems to have made
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many of us less compassionate and more likely to favour coercion where people supported by the ever retreating state are concerned. While the rewards go to the wealthy, the poor get it in the neck. Even the government’s adoption action
plan has a coercive whiff . Quite rightly, it wants to reduce the time children languish in care before decisions are made about their future; however, social workers are also told that they often invest too much hope in birth families. In one study, the action plan darkly points
out, ‘almost all professionals did everything they could to keep families together and parents were given repeated opportunities to prove they could look after a child.’ The study in question showed that this had been done to excess, but is perseverance with birth families such a bad thing if done sensibly? We have been here before. The Children Act 1975, which emerged from the public outcry over the death of 7-year- old Maria Colwell two years earlier, was designed to make adoption easier (see book review, p15). But it was also widely deemed to be punitive to birth parents and the 1989 Children Act was brought in partly to eliminate the injustice. Social workers and their clients tend to
fl ourish when compassion rules rather than coercion, as our article on the use of the recovery model in substance misuse services suggests (p16). The government must not disregard birth families in its desire to see more children adopted.
4 SOCIALWORKMATTERS APR12
hese are hard times indeed if you’re on a low income or disabled or have a mental health problem. Benefi ts and tax credits
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CONTENTS Marriage of convenience
ocial work fi nds itself in a diffi cult political climate, in the shadow of the new Health and Social Care Act and on
the eve of the expected government White Paper on adult social care. So it can be challenging to think ahead to what our sector might look like in the future. As the NHS grapples with the introduction of more private companies to provide services, we in social care have already had experience of tendering contracts to providers since the early 1990s. I’d like to think that lessons will be learned in the wake of the collapse of Southern Cross and the scandals of quality of care in hospitals like Winterbourne View. Ultimately, however diffi cult the marriage of diff erent ‘systems’ and cultures may be, the union of health and social care is inevitable. Current systems of pushing costs and needs between one or the other ‘silo’ benefi ts no one, least of all those who depend most on the services that we provide. The confusion over responsibilities and costs can hinder joint working, which is best promoted at the heart of an organisation when individuals know one another and are able to work well together rather than see their role in isolation.
While it is unclear precisely what will happen to social care and health joint working when GP commissioning groups take over fully from primary care trusts, it remains essential for the voice of social work to be heard advocating for our expertise - and, most importantly, for those who use and need our services. Good social work has to be at the heart of integrated health and social care and we must be prepared to argue our case.