Social Services Workforce

Part of the debate – in the Scottish Parliament at 3:39 pm on 29 April 2010.

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Photo of Kenneth Macintosh Kenneth Macintosh Labour 3:39, 29 April 2010

I do not know whether you, Presiding Officer, or other members saw an intriguing article in the papers this week with a headline that read:

"Nurses blame Holby City for unrealistic expectations".

Apparently, the portrayal of medical miracles in television dramas such as "Holby City" is responsible not only for raising hopes of what can be achieved in our hospitals, but for feeding the blame culture, which results in endless and expensive litigation against our national health service staff when things go wrong. To be honest, I am not sure that I bought the whole argument, but it is true that nurses have long been worried about their portrayal as ministering angels of mercy, which is a flattering but not very helpful description and a set-up that almost demands a fall.

If nurses are the angels, social workers and social services staff are undoubtedly the demons—they are blamed for every damaged child or every case of abuse or neglect that they encounter. In fact, those who work in social services attract the opprobrium without the initial flattery. Those are simply popular stereotypes but, unfortunately, they help to undermine and damage one of the most important workforces in the public sector. Rather than simply value and respect those who care for the most frail and vulnerable members of society, we are too quick to pounce on them and hold them responsible for everything that goes wrong.

I want to highlight the role that we politicians play in furthering those stereotypes or, I hope, challenging them. The minister and my colleague, Karen Whitefield, commented on that in their opening remarks. The point is not so much that we, too, use the convenient shorthand of angels of mercy for nursing staff and other carers—we do—but more that we offer supposed solutions to some of society's most intractable problems. After each and every tragedy, we respond to the calls of, "Something must be done." I do not believe that we intend to, but we help to create an illusion that the problems could be fixed if only social workers did this, that or the next thing.

There are of course actions that we can take now that would make a difference. I am not saying that they would solve all the problems that face the social work profession or care in our communities, but they would certainly move us in the right direction. The efforts that have been made as a result of the 21st century social work review and its "Changing Lives" report have been crucial to improving the profession's morale. Good leadership and improved support and management will help those who deliver social services and those who receive them.

The briefing by Unison and the British Association of Social Workers that was circulated before the debate was particularly informative. One of the many quotes in the document that particularly caught my eye was from the final report of the social work task force in England. It states:

"We are in no doubt that too many social workers are carrying caseloads which can be too high and make it hard for them to do their job well. There is very strong evidence that the absence of effective management of workload makes practitioners feel de-skilled, lowers their morale and can lead to poor health".

The scary thing for me when I read that description of the pressures on front-line social service staff was that I recognised—with some guilt, I must say—the similarities with my office. Members are certainly not social workers, but many of us and our constituency staff will know what it is like to have simply too many cases to deal with. Dare I say it but, in members such as me, staff do not necessarily have the most effective managers of case load. If we MSPs feel the stress of managing difficult case loads, it is not difficult to imagine the pressure on social care staff, on whose shoulders so much more depends.

The other crucial policy development that I am pleased we support across party and political divides is the getting it right for every child policy, which has at its heart the principle of sharing information and sharing responsibility without avoiding it. I hope that it will make a tremendous difference over the long term.

The cases that make the headlines that so damage staff in social services often involve helpless children or frail elderly people. The question that is always asked is, "How could we let such vulnerable people down?" However, as several members have said, social workers and carers often have to deal with needy, manipulative, demanding, aggressive, obstructive, violent, disturbed and abusive individuals. At the same time, and sometimes in the same cases, those people will themselves have been neglected and abused and in need of protection. It helps no one to stereotype the social care workforce, to oversimplify often complex lives and to overreact or to try to find someone to blame following the worst cases; instead, that hinders our efforts to develop and support a confident and competent social care workforce.

What other attitudes or prejudices do we politicians add to the mix, with the best of intentions but perhaps sub-optimum outcomes? I do not particularly want to stray into imminent election territory, but I am conscious that the family is often held up by politicians from all sides as being the ideal supportive and loving relationship in which to bring up children and care for the elderly. We tend to mythologise family ties, yet we know that the family bonds and relationships that we praise can hide domestic violence. While social workers are excluded from a family home or kept in the dark, family members can be complicit in keeping quiet about horrific abuse and neglect. We read or hear rarely about strangers abusing children; far more commonly, authorities look to a close relative such as a father or uncle. However, we do not round on families—we blame the authorities and social workers.

Perhaps an even trickier question is deciding how acceptable intervening in family lives is. At the turn of the 20th century, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children was known in poorer communities as the Cruelty—an organisation that would come and take people's kids from them. The Cruelty was an ironic term that reflected the them-and-us attitude of the working classes to middle-class interference.

Of course, we have come full circle. The emphasis on keeping families together at all costs that is reflected in the Children Act 1989 means that babies born to families whose children have all been taken into care are left with parents who do not care for them. Parents with a known record of abuse and neglect are often given repeated chances to bond with their new children, until it is too late. We need to review our approach to early intervention.

I mention in passing one of my bêtes noires: risk aversion, from which the social services workforce suffers, as we all do in today's society. In theory, we have put in place multitudinous layers of protection for the most vulnerable among us, but sometimes that supposedly protective shield is simply an illusion. Bureaucracy and report filling are used to protect staff or the service from blame rather than the child or vulnerable adult.

I suggested that additional resources are not the only issue that is at stake. It is difficult to see how worsening terms and conditions for staff can improve services. Community Care Providers Scotland has highlighted how much competitive tendering and continuous retendering of social services, particularly among voluntary sector providers, has had a detrimental effect on carers and the work that they do.

We need to become a more caring society. As politicians, we need to move away from holding out so-called solutions. Providing more resources, better training and organisational restructuring might help, but society becoming kinder and more thoughtful would really help. In policy documents, that is often included in the clumsy expression, "Building community capacity." We are reminded every day that tough times might be ahead, that the spending environment is difficult and that public services will be under pressure. That is all the more reason to talk about reassessing our values and looking out for others—our neighbours, families and friends. The job is not just for social workers. As the memorably titled 2002 report into child protection said, "It's everyone's job to make sure I'm alright." As politicians, that is our job, too.