nce again the future of adult social care hangs in the balance. The Queen’s speech due on May 9, which sets out the
government’s legislative agenda for the coming year, might have been expected to provide some answers.
But it is doubtful whether any will be
forthcoming either then or in the care and support White Paper likely to be published in a month’s time. The Dilnot review said that an extra £1.7 billion a year would be needed to fund social care, a stark truth that the Treasury is unwilling to confront. Instead, if anything, public spending on
vulnerable adults has fallen. Age UK says that council budgets for older people dropped by £0.5 billion to £7.3 billion in 2011, compared with the previous year, at a time when the number of people with dementia is rising by 25,000 annually. Services will be needed for 1 million dementia suff erers in 10 years time, yet they are scarcely coping now. Lower down the age range, 70,000 seriously ill or disabled people are currently having their employment and support allowance cut or stopped altogether because they are deemed fi t for work, despite controversy surrounding the capability assessment which decides their fate. And there are hundreds of thousands more who are losing out (see welfare reform, p16). Against this background, the White Paper must make up for what it omits to say about funding with some strong pledges about the status of social work in adult services. Eff ective practice in safeguarding vulnerable adults has never been more necessary and it is best done by social workers (see ‘What service users value,’ p18). Care services minister Paul Burstow promised that the paper would promote social work. We hope so.
4 SOCIALWORKMATTERS MAY12
Effective practice in
safeguarding has never been more necessary
I
CONTENTS Our voice in adoption debate
t’s been hard to escape the current government focus on adoption and targets within social work and for social workers. Although it is not an area I have direct
working experience of, I’m certainly familiar with the idea of working to targets. Measuring output and workload is not something I would object to in itself, but it can be counterproductive to set some of these targets and guidelines too rigidly. This is particularly the case if there’s a thought that a more populist agenda is being chased by a government that wants to ‘do something’ or be seen to do something. So is a target for time for adoptions to be
completed reasonable? As a profession, we cannot aff ord to be defensive about the areas where there ought to be improvement for the benefi t of those who need the services that we provide. We have to be able to accept that not all
practice is good and that we can constantly make improvements, but it is paramount that the eventual benefi t must be for the children and their families for whom we are working. If an ideal match between child and adoptive parents is in the neighbouring local authority, it makes no sense for each local authority to only hold their own lists. Equally, if a perfect match takes 18 months rather than 11, it is far better that it does so.
What does not help is when issues that are fundamental to the lives of families are used for political purposes. It is to be hoped that the government
will listen to reasoned and experienced professionals in setting the agenda for policy in relation to adoption but social work and politics have always been inexorably linked. The most we can do is provide a platform for our voices to be added to the agenda.