LABOUR SOCIAL WORK GROUP –  March 2024

MANIFESTO FOR A LABOUR SOCIAL CARE AND SOCIAL WORK SERVICE

 As a group of committed Labour activists and social work professionals, we urge an incoming Labour government to commit to:

• Provide an ‘essentials guarantee’ for everyone dependent on welfare benefits 
• Entrust the delivery of social care services to democratically elected local government 
• Restore the fundamental principle that Every Child Matters
• Ensure fair, respectful and effective social care and community services for older people and adults of working age
• End Labour’s ambiguity about the value of the social work profession and commit to its support and development across all domains of service delivery

1. PROVIDE AN ‘ESSENTIALS GUARANTEE’ FOR EVERYONE DEPENDENT ON WELFARE BENEFITS 
   1. The Conservative government’s inhumane policies have doubled the number of families living in destitution to 1.8 million, including at least 1 million children (Rowntree Foundation and Trussell Trust 2023). People with disabilities are going without essential care or being threatened with eviction because they have to pay for their homecare out of benefits (Guardian May 28 May 2023). 
   1. To address the urgency and desperation resulting from extreme poverty the Labour Party should fully support the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Trussell Trust scheme to enshrine a claimant’s legal entitlement to an ”essentials guarantee”. ‘This would lift children (and adults) out of destitution and poverty which – as Sir Michael Marmot’s review comprehensively evidenced – seriously damages their health, education and welfare, incurring both short – and longer- term personal and economic costs (see Guardian Letters, Prof. Mike Stein, 26 October 2023; Guardian Leader, 31st August 2023).
   1. Labour should review and reform the Benefits system to remove anomalies and injustices such as adults of working age who are reliant on Universal Credit and are unable to work or engage in education due to illness or disability, being charged for essential social care; and adults of working age who are terminally ill being unable to access pensions to which they have contributed until they became too incapacitated to work.  

• ENTRUST THE DELIVERY OF SOCIAL CARE SERVICES TO DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED LOCAL GOVERNMENT 
  • Even within inevitable budgetary constraints, as with schools and health services an incoming Labour government must move away from the mismanaged and grossly under-funded social welfare and care services they have become under this Tory government. 
  • A clear way forward, that accords with Labour’s policy direction, is to cut back on overly intrusive micro-management by Central Government (specifically the over-reliance on private consultancies and short-term ‘pilot’ approach to funding allocation) and entrust most funding and detailed policy and service provision arrangements to democratically accountable local communities. Local Authorities have the legal accountability for the assessment of need for social work and social care services, and in partnership with health and community partners, for safeguarding vulnerable people from a range of harms. 
  • There is no contradiction here with Labour’s policy direction of creating a National, locally delivered, Care Service. ‘Labour recognises the preventative impact of high-quality, holistic and relational social care, which can keep people well and supports independent living for longer. As such, the National Care Service will be a needs-based, locally delivered system, where people are helped to stay in their homes for as long as possible and where disabled adults have choice and control over their support.’ National Policy Forum Final Report to conference. 
  • Such arrangements leave the way open for detailed but also flexible arrangements for the delivery of different components of the service, in particular the place of social workers and broader social and mental health services that will be available to adults, children and families tailored to the communities in which they live.
  • Flexible devolved arrangements arrived at in light of population need, geography, transport, are equally relevant to adults and children (as just one example, there are many families where both parents and children have disabilities or have experienced trauma, where increasingly elderly grandparents with disabilities are stepping in when children need protection). We therefore urge that Labour policies for locality-based social work and social care services for children and adults must be considered alongside each other (as indeed happens in some local authorities, for example that have a ‘Director of People Services’ and Scrutiny arrangements that combine adult and children services). 
  • The first step to ensuring that local authorities/ other devolved arrangements can fulfil their statutory and human rights duties to provide the range of social care services to appropriately meet differing needs is to arrive at a new funding model. The present funding system is broken: many are left without necessary services or wait so long that their conditions deteriorate. We concur with Clive Betts MP who opened a House of Commons debate on social care services on 8 March 2023: ‘We cannot carry on believing that the existing local government settlement finance system, with occasional top-ups from Government on an ad-hoc basis every year or so, will sustain adult social care for the longer term’. 

3. RESTORE THE FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE THAT EVERY CHILD MATTERS 

• Helen Hayes MP as Shadow Children’s Minister spoke out forcibly against the Government’s response to the Review of children’s social care, saying ‘There is no vision for the direction of children’s social care. There is no ambition for our most vulnerable children. There is no cross-cutting commitment from the top of government to deliver better for every child and every care-experienced person in every part of our country.’   (House of Commons, 3^rd February 2023). This continues to be the case as the Department for Education picks off small parts of the recommended reforms. On coming into office a Labour government will need to urgently review Tory plans for the sector. 
  • We welcome the critique of the years of neglect, mismanagement, and wasteful expenditure of public funds during the Tory years that has been made by Labour Shadow team members and Labour MPs. We welcome plans to reverse the damage done to ‘universal’ services (child care, schools, youth work, social security system, housing and homelessness services).
  • We welcome clear statements that prevention, partnership and community are at the heart of Labour’s vision for child and family services. Set in the context of the current rights-based legal framework (UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and Children Act 1989 as amended), these continue to provide the framework for any necessary changes in democratically accountable community and rights-based child and family social services.

Early Years and neighbourhood family centres

• We support the developing plans for an Early Years education, day care and family support service and urge that policy and detailed plans build on the learning from the Labour government’s Sure Start and Every Child Matters and Care Matters provisions.
  • The Tory government’s ‘Family Hubs’ programme is an under-funded, pale shadow of these. In addition, top-down structures for micro-management and unnecessary ‘evaluations’ (the research messages are already clear) result in unnecessary costs and reduce local flexibility. Whatever funding is available (and the present funding allocation does not come close to the conclusions of the Children’s Social Care Review) should be provided to all local authorities on the basis of an agreed model to assess population needs. This should result in the development of a comprehensive network of Family Centres for children across the age groups, with an emphasis on support for the diversity of families These must be ‘open access’ and ‘joined up’ with the wider ‘universal’ services. 

Respect and collaboration 

• The Labour government should Invest in models of social work practice and service provision which increase the involvement of children, adult family members (including kinship carers and family members and carers of children in care) in decisions both on service design and individual care and support plans. One aspect of Government policy to be welcomed and built on is the introduction of family meetings into family support, protection, court and in-care services.
  • An incoming Labour government should set up effective cross-departmental structures (to include local government representatives) so that housing, social security, schools, health services (especially child and adult mental health and addictions services), youth and adult justice safeguarding services work collaboratively. Labour should consider setting up a Government Department for the Family (recognising families in all their diversities and across generations) to reduce poor co-ordination and costly duplication. This is especially necessary for parents who have disabilities and children with complex health, education and care needs.

Asylum seeking or migrant children and families

• The new Labour Government should urgently repeal the ‘Illegal’ Immigration Act 2023. 

Alongside broad provisions for all refugee, asylum seeking or migrant families and those with ‘no recourse to public funds’, Labour should enact legislation to require that asylum seeking or migrant children are legally ‘looked after’ by local authorities under the 1989 Act provisions (within DfE government department remit) and not subject to the authority of the Home Office.

Children in need of protection and in local authority care 

• Labour policy teams need to be making detailed plans now so as to be ready to provide for children and families with high level and specialist needs and to replace the Tory government’s ill-thought through, poorly evidenced actual and planned changes to community-based and in-care services. 
  •  Policies including those for social worker career development must ensure there is continuity of relationships with social workers and other professionals across ‘early help’ and child protection, in-care and care leaver services. 
  •  Labour should end the profiteering in children’s social care by increasing the supply and range of high quality local authority foster families, and children’s homes as homely environments where the diverse needs of children and young people in care can be met. This should be achieved at the local level and with regional planning as appropriate for those with very complex needs but without the added bureaucracy and the failed market approach underpinning the Government’s plans for ‘regional cooperatives’.
  •  Labour must end the discrimination against young people living in independent and semi-independent accommodation by enacting their entitlement to ‘care’ up to 18 years of age.
  •  Labour should consult with care experienced children and adults and advocacy bodies on how to introduce care experience as a ‘protected status’ under the Equalities Act for all qualified young people.
  •  Labour should implement the robust research findings on promoting the resilience of young people from care to adulthood. Specific measures that should be put in place for all children in care and care leavers are needed to ensure access to leaving care services, to help young people with life skills, education, employment and training, housing, finance and wellbeing, and support those who require additional help – those from diverse backgrounds, young parents, those with mental health problems and disabilities, LGBTQ+, and asylum-seeking young people.
  •  Labour policy should ensure that children and young people in and out of care have access to rights-based services, to independent advocacy services, legal advice where needed, and support by care experienced individuals and groups.

• FAIR, RESPECTFUL AND EFFECTIVE SOCIAL CARE AND COMMUNITY SERVICES FOR OLDER PEOPLE AND ADULTS OF WORKING AGE

A broken system 

• The priority that is having to be given to the NHS’s urgent needs, especially hospital discharge, has distracted attention from the fundamental and vital purpose of adult social care. This includes but goes well beyond the essential role that social care can play in preventing many avoidable admissions to hospitals and costly residential care and nursing homes. As well as the implications for the NHS, these avoidable admissions are actively damaging to the health and wellbeing of the people concerned, bearing in mind that older people rapidly lose physical strength, confidence and self-care skills and become demoralised as a result of even brief hospital admissions, which can compromise their independence and care options on discharge. 
  • More than 50% of national expenditure on Social Care and the area of greatest demand and cost pressure on local authorities comes from the needs of adults of working age. This includes people with a wide range of disabling conditions, including the effects of chronic long-term illnesses, physical disabilities, learning disabilities, troubling mental health and other conditions which disadvantage their quality of life and their ‘ordinary life’ opportunities. The future Labour government should invest in local councils to enable them to use their detailed and specific knowledge of need in their area, to develop and deliver personalised services to people in their own homes, in partnership with voluntary and community organisations. 
  • Very large numbers of people of all ages living in their own homes in the community desperately need to receive a service, but are deemed ineligible, or are receiving services that are insufficient or of inadequate quality, often because of the inadequacy of local government funding. 
  • The current model of social care funding and provision is broken. Social care provision is currently provided in a fragmented and uncoordinated way by many different organisations, mostly from the private sector. Care home businesses have been purchased by private equity companies that have asset stripped them so that they have become unviable, and then closed down, creating instability, and undermining the safety and wellbeing of highly vulnerable people. Domiciliary and even more so residential care is currently of variable and too often unacceptably poor quality; although it should be acknowledged that some providers, often smaller organisations, provide care that is exemplary.

Building a skilled, responsive and effective service 

• The future Labour government should urgently provide the funding needed to cover, for example, the gap identified by council political leaders of all parties, Directors of Adult Social Services, and NHS leaders, in what is needed to stabilise care providers, to cover the real costs of inflation, of more people ageing and living longer with disabling conditions, and to fund the increase in the national living wage.  
  • There is an ever-deepening crisis in recruiting, training and retaining social care workers, and a parallel workforce crisis in social work (see Section 5). There are 152,000 care staff vacancies currently, and around 390,000 care workers leave their jobs annually (Report of National Audit Office and The Guardian 10 Nov 2023). The Tory government has repeatedly promised but failed to make available the funding needed to provide the training, pay and career structure that is essential to give social care the skilled and reliable workforce that it desperately needs. This needs to be an urgent priority for the new Labour government. 
  • Labour should prioritise measures that provide meaningful support to relatives and carers and to voluntary organisations working in the community to provide important preventive help. 
  • Adult social care within a local authority’s statutory responsibilities will always require qualified and registered social workers to undertake a number of specific tasks – for example, assessing the needs of more deeply troubled people or people who have complex comorbid health conditions and and/or challenging relationships within their family or carer network, safeguarding of adults most at risk, mental health and mental capacity/deprivation of liberty judgments.  
  •  An increasing number of older people are facing situations characterised by uncertainty, fear, poverty, transitions, complexity, change, loss, social vulnerability (e.g. poverty, poor housing, living alone, isolation, poor diet, self-neglect), and risk. These interleave with health problems to amplify the depth and impact of both health and social problems. These circumstances require confident professional values and social work skills – for example, showing respect, empathy, understanding ‘wants’, analysis and interpretation, negotiation, having ‘difficult’ conversations, managing others’ anxieties and undertaking careful, nuanced risk assessments.
  •  There is a linked need for social workers in Adults’ services to have expertise in working with family carers: to assess carer needs including risks related to providing care and providing support and advice. An increasing number of family carers are older themselves and have their own health issues. Appreciating and taking account of this dyadic context is an important part of the social work role. Tensions between older people and carers arise often; these need to be resolved and the care and support needs of both parties addressed. 
  •  Labour policy should give priority to services which enhance the quality of life and independence of people according to their own wishes, as advocated by the #socialcarefuture movement. This does not just mean endorsing statements such as ‘Nothing about us without us’ and ‘We all want to live in a place we call home, with people and things we love, in communities where we look out for each other, doing the things that matter to us.’ It means implementing policies which assure these outcomes. 
• END LABOUR’S AMBIGUITY ABOUT THE VALUE OF THE SOCIAL WORK PROFESSION AND COMMIT TO ITS SUPPORT AND DEVELOPMENT ACROSS ALL DOMAINS OF SERVICE DELIVERY
  •  As demonstrated by eminent Labour former social workers such as Clement Atlee and Mark Drakeford, social work values of compassion, dignity, inclusion, human rights, and social justice are also core Labour values. 
  • Labour policies for the provision of democratically accountable partnership-based community and residential social care services must include recognition that professionally qualified, registered social workers are a distinct professional group within statutory and voluntary sector social and health care services. They are essential to the fulfilment of many statutory responsibilities and safeguarding duties for both children and adults. 
  • In particular, social workers are central to the service provided to people whose experiences and personalities make them resistant to engaging with mainstream services. To do this they mobilise partnerships with family members, community services and professionals from other services to respond to complex needs and support people to exercise choice and achieve greater independence, and to make their own positive contribution to the lives of others.
  • There is a well-documented crisis in the recruitment and retention of social workers across adults’ and children’s services, leading too often to lack of or unplanned changes of social worker. All too often trusting relationships are not established: deterioration in health and wellbeing results in people no longer receiving the assistance they need in their own homes. In short, an effective, ethical, and reliable social work service is essential to meet the Labour aim to emphasise preventive and community services, and to meet the needs of those in greatest distress and at risk of serious harm. 
  • Taking note of the impact of the high vacancy rate and the documented harm and distress that this is causing, a Labour government must, as a priority and in consultation with professional associations, Trades Unions, democratically elected bodies, educators, and the regulator take steps to improve the recognition, recruitment, payment, training, and retention of social workers.
  • Specifically, a Labour government should urgently fund, consult on and put in place a high-profile national recruitment campaign to encourage people from across ethnic and social backgrounds to apply to train as social workers. This must be backed by a review of the adequacy and cost effectiveness of the funding streams currently available for social work education, and the immediate increase of bursaries to HEI social work students. 
  • Noting that the social work recruitment problem is compounded by an acute retention problem, much of it caused or made worse by high vacancy rates, and stress caused by dangerously high workloads, a Labour Government should take steps to improve the professional support and supervision available and increase locally accessible post-qualifying training across all fields of social work. LSWG supports the recommendations of Trades Unions, Labour LGA and BASW on workforce development and pay and conditions of service for social workers and all those within the broader social care and social/ community services.
  • A Labour government should call a halt to the moves under the Tory government to use specialist initial training routes which limit the range of knowledge skills and career options and fragment the social work workforce at the point of entry to the profession. Whilst the development of some specialist interests is appropriate during initial training, and additional specialist knowledge and skills have to be acquired once in employment, early identification with and training focused on a particular age or needs group (as is currently a policy direction with child protection and mental health) limits the career flexibility that is important to employers and to individual social workers and improves retention within the profession.  It also limits the breadth of practice experience and leadership capability of those who become senior managers, policy influencers and directors. 
  •  A Labour government should, additionally, take steps to reduce the need for and extent of social workers in statutory roles being employed by profit-making recruitment agencies, which imposes additional costs but also crucially means that those who need a social work service are faced with multiple changes of social worker, making it impossible for them to establish a trusting relationship with the professional accountable for making key decisions about the services available to them.

About Labour Social Work Group

This Manifesto for social care and social work services under a Labour Government comes from the Labour Social Work Group- a member-led group recognised by the Labour Party which seeks to contribute to improved wellbeing and life chances of some of the most vulnerable members of society, by strengthening the place of socialist principles within social work policy and practice and within the broader social care and community public and voluntary sector services. As social workers we provide community and personal services, research and training across age and needs groups, and work collaboratively across public services and the voluntary sector, with people who use services, their carers and advocacy groups.