Social Services

Part of Electronic Devices (Madam Speaker's Statement) – in the House of Commons at 3:34 pm on 12 March 1997.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Stephen Dorrell Stephen Dorrell The Secretary of State for Health 3:34, 12 March 1997

With permission, Madam Speaker, I should like to make a statement about the Government's White Paper on the future of social services in England and Wales.

Local authority social service departments were created in roughly their present form in 1971. They are responsible for social care services for a wide variety of people, among them elderly people, those with physical or learning disabilities and mentally ill people, as well as children who would otherwise be at risk of neglect or abuse. The many local authority members, directors and staff who over that long period have built those services deserve credit for what has been achieved.

The Government believe that the growing size and importance of social service departments make necessary a major reassessment of their role and structure. Today's White Paper sets out a package of proposals for the reform of social service provision. The Government will implement those proposals in a social services reform Bill that we shall introduce early in the next Parliament.

Social service departments currently combine three responsibilities that sit uneasily together: first, they assess care needs and use public money to commission care; secondly, they provide directly a range of social care services; and, thirdly, they regulate private and voluntary sector providers of social care services. The centrepiece of the Government's social services reform Bill will be the separation of those three functions.

The Bill will provide that social service departments should in future concentrate on their role as assessors of care need and commissioners of care services. It will require each social service authority to publish separate accounts for its assessment and commissioning function, and it will provide for the making of secondary legislation that will set out the quality and value-for-money issues on which social service departments will be required to publish performance indicators. Those indicators will allow council tax payers to examine the performance of their own social service department and to compare its performance with that of other equivalent departments.

The Bill will also amend the power of social service authorities to provide social care services. At present, social service authorities have a general power to provide such social care services as they think fit to meet local needs. The Government propose to amend that power to provide that, in respect of residential and domiciliary services for adults, the power can be used only when an authority can show that direct provision of service by the local authority is necessary to meet a need that cannot be met locally by the non-statutory sector.

The legislation will require formal reviews of existing direct provision for adults to be conducted periodically by each authority; those reviews will be transparent and the views of local interested parties will be sought. The law will place a strong and clear onus of proof on authorities wishing to retain existing direct provision or to expand their commitment to directly provided services. The criteria against which the review will have to be carried out will be set out in regulations.

The third element of the social services reform Bill will be a new structure for the regulation of social care and nursing home provision. The Government believe that it is important that that function is separated from others currently carried out by social service departments. We also believe that the standards that are required by regulation should be applied to both public and private sector provision, and that separate regulation of care homes by health and social service authorities, which can currently lead to wasteful duplication of effort, should be brought to an end.

The legislation will therefore require local health and social service authorities to create joint statutory bodies in each area, with membership drawn from the participating authorities. Those bodies will regulate both the social care services now regulated by local authorities and the nursing homes currently regulated by health authorities. The scope of regulation will be extended to cover private sector domiciliary and day care services and small children's homes, as well as the public sector social care services that are currently free of regulation. Health authorities will continue to regulate private hospitals and certain other specialist health facilities, as they do now.

The creation of a single regulatory authority for social care raises the question whether it is right to maintain the legal division of adult care homes into residential homes and nursing homes. The Government see the attraction of moving towards a single category, in which each care home would be assessed and licensed according to the needs of the clientele it is intended to serve. That more flexible structure would make it easier for people who become more dependent to move to a different level of care without having to move to a different care home. The details of such a change will need full assessment, and the Government will consult further on those issues.

In addition to those important changes to the structure of social service departments, today's White Paper takes forward some other important aspects of social service provision. Under the Children Act 1989, the child's welfare is the paramount consideration. The Government believe that that is the correct focus. They do not believe, however, that emphasising the wishes of the individual child should be allowed to become an excuse for distorting the proper relationship between children and adults. We should not blindly ascribe to all children the capacity to make mature decisions about their interests, which are the proper responsibility of adults.

The chief inspector of social services in England recently issued revised guidance to the managers of children's homes, which underlined their responsibility to provide a disciplined framework for the lives of children in their care. The Government will continue to monitor the operation of the Children Act 1989, and they will act again if it can be demonstrated that there is a need to reassert the proper balance between the rights of the child and the responsibilities of adults.

The social services reform Bill will also place a new obligation on the local authority collectively, not just on the social service department, to prepare a full children's services plan. Those plans will be required to show how social services, education, health and housing authorities, as well as the juvenile justice system, will co-operate to identify children who are at risk and to take the action necessary to safeguard their interests.

Finally, on children's services, the White Paper sets out the Government's intention to improve the training provided to social workers who work with children. The Government believe that social workers who undertake that most difficult area of work with children should receive specialist training, as do approved social workers who are entrusted with powers under the mental health legislation.

Today's White Paper is the third element in the reform package for key elements of the modern welfare state that the Government have unveiled in the past 10 days. Last week, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Social Security set out the Government's plans to improve pension provision over a generation. Earlier this week, I set out our plans to assist many of today's generation of pensioners in planning for the costs of dependency in old age. In today's White Paper, the Government show how social service departments need to evolve to provide high-quality, good-value services.

The changes proposed in the White Paper reflect the Government's view that, in a modern society, the principal responsibility for meeting social care need rests on individual citizens, who should plan to meet their own needs and respond to the needs of their families and their neighbours. The role of statutory social service departments is to act as a support to those, including carers, who meet social care needs in those ways. Statutory social services provision is an essential function in a modern society, and today's White Paper shows how the Government intend to ensure that it continues to be delivered to a high standard.