New Clause 2
Children and Young Persons Bill [Lords]
9:00 am
Tim Loughton (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; East Worthing and Shoreham, Conservative)
I shall come to that in a minute. The hon. Lady makes a good point. Obviously, some of the roles are set out in the new clause.
My other point is that the commission found that of some 76,000 social workers registered with the GSCC, only 11,000 belonged to the British Association of Social Workers. There is a problem, therefore, regarding a strong voice for the profession, and the head of the BASW in giving evidence admitted some of the shortcomings of the current situation. In contrast, the British Medical Association represents the interests of 70 per cent. of doctors and the Royal College of Nursing represents 60 per cent. of nurses. There is not a big body that speaks up for social workers.
The post of chief social worker may be occupied by somebody who is already in the Department of Health. There will be a slight anomaly and a split between adult social workers and children social workers. Whether the chief social worker would be equally responsible to the Department for Children, Schools and Families and the Department of Health is to be determined. For example, in the Department of Health we have David Behan, who is well known to many of us as director general for social care—he was previously chief inspector of the Commission for Social Care Inspection. He is exceedingly well respected and highly qualified. The proposal may mean re-badging somebody like David Behan, if not David Behan himself.
I am not talking about an enormous upheaval in structures, creating a whole new department within the Department of Health or the Department for Children, Schools and Families, but about having a higher profile for a lead person who is recognised as the chief social worker. I shall summarise their roles, as set out in the new clause. They would be the face of social workers in the media, in particular when there was a big case. They would also carry the can in the public eye when there seemed to be something wrong with the system, and they would oversee the promotion of the social worker profession and better recruitment campaigns, and would advise the Secretary of State or the Secretaries of State on technical matters to do with social workers. If we give that sort of status to a chief social worker, hopefully there will be a trickle-down effect on the status, standing and recognition of all social workers.
I do not pretend that this is a universal panacea, that overnight people will say, “Oh, now that we have a chief social worker, I am going to let my social worker over the threshold more often.” It is a question of building up those images and perceptions. I shall give the example of New Zealand, where as part of our study I had a long conversation with Marie Connolly, who is the chief social worker in that country. The post was created some years ago because they had the same problem there with the perception of social workers. They thought that it would be helpful to create the post of chief social worker. Marie appears frequently in the media. She told me that she had been offered her own regular newspaper column, to report on the life of social workers and on things going on in the profession. The innovation was generally judged to be successful, and we can learn many lessons from it.
Another thing that came up in our study—it seems a flippant suggestion but it is not—was that there should be a soap opera or a popular television programme centred on social workers. We have such programmes on doctors, nurses and teachers, and even forensic pathologists have become part of the culture of popular TV. Yet when social workers appear in soaps, in “EastEnders” for example, they are terribly stereotyped and portrayed in a pretty derogatory way as interfering, which only reinforces some of the misperceptions that many members of the public have. If we saw social workers in a different light, as human beings trying to do a difficult job—in many cases a very difficult job—in difficult circumstances with restraints on resources, people might come to appreciate their role more.
It is an important point of principle. If the Government were to adopt the idea, we could work on how to create the position. I do not intend it to be another bureaucratic structure within Government. It is largely a question of how we focus on one of the most important sets of people working with vulnerable families. Creating the post of chief social worker would send out some very positive messages to the profession, but perhaps more importantly to the public, who might come to appreciate social workers better. Social workers may then be able to do their difficult jobs more easily than they can at the moment. I commend new clause 2 to the Committee.