Political Rhetoric: Is Social Work on the political agenda in the run up to the general election?

Community Care reported on Wednesday that UKIP would seek wholesale reform of Britain's "clearly failing" child protection services, if elected. If I may overlook the fact that this is from UKIP for a second; if this policy was coming from any of the political parties I would be very interested in hearing more. Highly skilled and able practitioners are working in a very challenging environment with many systematic failures. If any party was to take an open and unbiased review of child protection services I would be very pleased because they would see what many of us have known for years. However, I am rather sceptical about any of their motives. In my experience politicians are too quick to scapegoat practitioners rather than look at the impossible system within which they are expected to practice safely and invest the necessary capital; because that is what is needed - INVESTMENT. 

When politicians refer to Child Protection Services what they are actually talking about is Children's Social Care. The problem with this choice of rhetoric is that it leads the majority of voters to believe it is not a service that they will ever need and therefore, whilst they may be interested and concerned, they would not prioritise spending in this area. This is a false dichotomy. Children's Social Care encompassed a whole host of services for a diverse demographic of children and young people. We are not just talking about front-line Social Workers but also the preventative services that are bearing the brunt of cuts; support and care for looked after children; services and respite for families of children with additional needs. Social Workers do not only work with 'troubled families' but also families experiencing crisis whatever their background. Leading the often complicated array of professionals and services are Social Workers. It is when Social Workers are overstretched and unable to do the job they love that the system falls apart and children are put at risk. Serious Case Reviews often cite poor multi-agency working - Social Workers, when sufficiently resourced, are the glue that holds it all together and should be valued for the job they do.

I have worked with an incredibly mixed demographic of clients in my time. Some would have fitted the governments definition of a 'troubled family' others would not. My role has involved safeguarding children from physical, sexual, and emotional harm. It has also included working with parents who need support and assistance as a result of redundancy, homelessness, illness and disability. One family in particular springs to mind as I write this; they were a young professional family who had fallen on hard times as a result of redundancy. Dad had lost his job and, as result of the economic downturn, was finding it difficult to bridge the gap. He was extremely conscientious, hard working and proud. He found it very difficult asking for help but when he was unable to pay the rent and they lost their home, without any extended family to offer assistance, he turned to Children's Services to help him, his wife and their two young daughters. It was only a month until he found employment again but I am sure he would say that we offered him a much needed lifeline. This was not his fault and I am sure a year or two earlier he would not have envisaged a time when he and his family would have ever needed the help of a Social Worker. This is my point: you never know when you will fall on hard times; this is why Social Care should be on the political agenda; and why voters should be interested in what party manifestos have to say about it. 

So, lets take a look at what the main parties have to say in their manifesto's.

Labour would avoid "extreme" social care cuts and continue to fund the Frontline fast track training scheme for Children's Social Work according to their manifesto. They would also:

• Increase support for children in kinship care and their families, a group it said is "too often overlooked and undervalued"
• Create a Child Protection Unit to work across government and drive progress in the prevention of child abuse and sexual exploitation.
• Introduce mandatory reporting on child abuse.
• Invest and extra £2.5bn a year in NHS to pay for frontline staff, including 5000 more care workers
• Incentivise local areas to integrate health and social care services by "bringing together" budgets, commissioners and providers at local level.
• End time limited 15 minute care visits 
• Ban the use of zero hours contracts, a move labour says will "improve the working life of care workers" 
  
• Ensure councils provide 'ring fenced' money for carers breaks 
• Tackled abuse in the care system by consulting on a new offence of corporate neglect for directors of care homes. 

The Conservatives would create regional adoption agencies that work across local authority boundaries, the party manifesto has pledged. "Far-reaching powers" over social care would also be devolved to large cities that opt to having an elected mayor, like Greater Manchester. Their party manifesto also said they would:

• integrate health and social care through the Better Care Fund, the system of pooled budgets that comes into force this month, and pilot new approaches to joined up services between homes, clinics and hospitals
• Place a cap on individuals accrued care costs that comes into force April 2016, as a result of the Care Act 2014, and the deferred payments scheme to prevent people having to pay for care, which was introduced this month.
• Women will have access to mental health support during and after pregnancy, and the provision of health and community based "places of safety" for people suffering mental health crises.
• Support commissioners to combine better health and social care services for terminally ill patients so that more people are able to die in a place of their choice.
• Continue to overhaul how police, social services and other agencies work together to protect vulnerable children, with a focus on the kind of sexual exploitation exposed in Rotherham. 
• Training programmes, including Frontline, would be supported to "continue to raise the quality of children's social work"
• Enforcing new access and waiting times for people experiencing mental ill-health, including children and young people
• Ensuring there are therapists in every part of the country providing treatment for people that need it

The Liberal Democrats have pledged to "radically transform mental health services" if they are elected to government. Their manifesto states that a Liberal Democrat government would build on the work of the coalition to establish parity between physical and mental health services. They also say they would:

• Extend the use of personal budgets, integrating care more fully with the rest of the NHS, the introduction of rigorous inspections and high quality standards
• More comprehensive data collection to track outcomes and changes to the way services are funded so mental health does not lose out in future funding decisions
• Revolutionise children's mental health by spending £250m a year on implementing the proposals in the coalition governments children and young people's mental health task-force report. 
• Frontline public service workers would get better training on mental health 
• Social care and health budgets will be fully pooled by 2018 through local agreements. At a national level, the Department of Health would take responsibility for funding adult social care from the Department for Communities and Local Government.
• Combine public health, adult social care and and health outcome frameworks into a single national well-being outcomes framework
• A statutory code of conduct, backed up by care workers' suitability register, would be established to "ensure those who work in the care sector are properly trained ad suitable to practice"
• The fast track Social Worker training programme Frontline would be expanded to 300 graduates a year
• Training for Social Workers in areas with high prevalence of female genital mutilation or forced marriage to help those at risk
• Implement provisions to cap the cost of social care through the Care Act 2014
• Free end-of-life social care for those placed on their local end of life register, if evidence shows it is affordable and cost effective
• Raising the professional status and and training of care home managers through statutory licencing
• Better support and training for Foster Carers, including on mental health issues
• Promoting restorative justice to help looked after children being drawn into the criminal justice system
• Increase access to cost effective talking therapies so "hundreds of thousands" more people can get this support, with an interim target of getting 25% f those suffering from mental health problems into treatment
• The creation of a £50m "world leading" mental health research fund
• A five-a-day style campaign to improve well-being and prevent mental illness

The Greens have pledged free social care and health care for all older people at a cost of "around £8bn a year" and an end to "failed" austerity. Their manifesto also promises:

• End of life social care would be free so that people can "choose where they die"
• The emotional abuse of children would be treated "on a par" with physical abuse, and police and child protection professionals will get guidance to help them tackle child neglect and early abuse
• £900m to pay foster carers a wage
• Increase spending on mental health care to ensure that everyone experiencing a mental health crisis would have safe access to 24/7 quality care, and that no one would wait more than 28 days for access to talking therapies
• The use of police cells as "places of safety" for children "should be eliminated by 2016"
• A further £500m for free social care for adults aged 18-65
• A 50% increase in the carers allowance
• Access to suitable emergency accommodation for the 200,000 young people who go missing every year if they are unable to return home safely
• National investment in evidence based parenting programmes in order to improve the life chances of children and family well-being in the first 1,001 days of a child's life 
• A UK wide strategy to tackle violence against women, including domestic violence, rape, sexual abuse, female genital mutilation and trafficking.

As mentioned earlier, UKIP would seek wholesale reform of the "clearly failing" child protection services in Britain, if it were to win the next general election. They would hold an open review of all childcare and child protection services, with a view to reforming the system. The cited concerns over "misplaced sensitivity to issues of race and religion", "forced adoptions" and professionals "letting serious cases of abuse and maltreatment slip through the net". In their manifesto UKIP said that they would:

• Monitor and the Care Quality Commission would be abolished and their functions would be given to county health boards made up of health and social care professionals "elected locally by their peers"
• Increase social care funding by £1.2bn each year and would pay for additional residential, nursing and care home services
• Children in residential homes would have the same rights as those in foster homes to stay in care until they are 21
• Review the family court system with the intention of implementing independent oversight of the courts
• Pay carers an extra £572 a year
• Fully integrate health and social care
• Invest £1.5bn into mental health and dementia services
• Introduce a legally binding 'dignity code', which UKIP believes will improve standards of professional care
• Abolish the practice of arranging home care visits in 15 minute windows

The Greens win for me but as we don't have a visible candidate in my area this is a mute point. What party impresses you the most? Why? I hope that the next government values Children's Social Care enough to invest in it. I hope that they realise it is not only a bad workman that blames his tools. It is impossible for Social Workers to produce good outcomes 100% of the time when they have sky high caseloads and dwindling preventative services.

---