Going Public

What has become of the public sector...

2012-02-09T09:05:00.000-08:00

Nice to see that some sort of research (albeit very imperfect research) is finally being done on the scale of outsourcing in the public sector. The fact remains however, that we still don't actually know the extent to which what was known as the public sector has been impacted by outsourcing.

Fully determining this is an enormously complicated business, and one which will get even more so. For instance take someone employed by Capita who is assessing Housing Benefit claims on behalf of a Local Authority. Sure they're not a public sector worker, but neither are they a private sector worker in the traditional sense - after all the way they do much of their job and the funding for it is still provided by the LA. Even more complicated if the person in question is working for multiple clients across the sectors, or who is not providing services directly, but is providing auxiliary services to those who do......

What's happening is a more complex hybridisation than a simple public/private, or even public/private/third dichotomy. In fact I'd go as far as saying that our understandings of the word 'sector' need to be thrown away.

Personalisation Risk and ResponsibilitySome interesting reports

2012-01-19T06:59:00.000-08:00

Following on from my last post I've just happened across some reports from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on the topic of rights an responsibilities. There is a particularly interesting discussion about risk in one paper which has actually pushed me a little closer to the pro camp on personalisation. Interestingly the paper draws a conclusion that under a system of personalisation;

Risk should be shared between the person who takes the risk and the system that is trying to support them. This has probably always been the case and in many ways the personalisation agenda simply makes this more explicit, shifting the balance of power and making genuine risk sharing more likely in future.

What of course is missing from the discussions is what such an overt cultural shift would be likely to mean. As I mentioned in the previous post the logical end-point is that there is a much reduced role for 'social services' as we know it today - particularly as a large part of care management is concerned with assessing for and managing risk.

Perhaps in terms of complex cases and at times of crisis there will still be some role, but for the rest of the time it is much diminished even possibly redundant.

Is this a good, or bad thing? In some respects it is good, it empowers individuals to make their own decisions and choices and yes, social care needs a cultural change. When I returned to university to study social policy I remember being sat in the canteen and seeing a social work student - discernable by the hoodie they wore. It is something of a fashion for people to wear hoodies with some kind of subject related double entendre on the back i.e 'Lawyers do it without briefs' or somesuch thing, but in this case it was a rather earnest 'Social Work; Be the difference.' Maybe I'm wrong, maybe its a noble sentiment, but for me it had a smack of arrogance and seemed to re-enforce the view of professional/service user divide. We should also not lose sight of the fact that the system is there to meet a need, i.e it is a means, not an end - therefore we have no interest in protecting the current system for its own sake.

On the other hand though there is an issue of the balance between rights and responsibilities which personalisation makes more clear. If we take a long-term view then it is possible to see a future in which it is the assumption that social care in most cases is largely a private matter, for individuals- a view which provides a platform for further retrenchment of the state from the social care sector. Maybe this too is a good thing; are private services more responsive to individuals needs, would the voluntary sector better anticipate needs and be better at providing innovative services, or would such a change be merely to abandon those in need to the vagaries of the free market?

I make no judgement on any of this at present. The debates are many, complex and fragmented (as my own dissertation on organisational mission across the three sectors finds), the key point though is that the debate on the future of social care needs to pay far more consideration to the likely implications of changes in assumptions around rights and responsibilities particularly around the movement of responsibility from the state to the individual.

Social Care: Rights and Responsibilities

2012-01-17T15:32:00.000-08:00

So this week brings a few more stories about the search a funding solution in social care. We all agree(and have done for quite a while) that the present system is not the best, but often as is the way with these things there seems to be less appetite for proposing real alternatives.

When it comes to alternatives and reform of the system there is a clear direction which debate has been taking over the past two decades, consisting of two interrelated dimensions these being; just how much are we expecting people to A.) take responsibility for their care and B.) contribute financially towards it.

In terms of A.) the popular policy term these days used across all aspects of the welfare state is 'co-production'- one of the best examples of co-production being individual budgets where people take an active role in managing services, not just the passive role of recipient.There are, it is to be said, lots of good things about individual budgets, but I always felt this policy agenda amounted to a much bigger cultural change than most of my colleagues ever really acknowledged, one involving a fundamental rewriting of the contract between service user and the state (or social services department).

Having just read Tony Blair's autobiography it seems co-production fits snugly with the emphasis on 'rights and responsibilities.' Ultimately in social care we're not just in effect handing over rights of control of care packages to individuals, but along with it all the responsibilities in terms of managing risk and ensuring the appropriateness of services to meet needs.Whilst the state still funds services, particularly for those without the resources, the logical end-point is for it to play only a limited role in assisting individuals with making choices from the mixed economy of welfare - in other words guiding the purchase, or accessing of services from the private and voluntary sectors.

I was even involved a few years ago in a pilot self-assessment project which had the aim of cutting out the middleman completely - imagine a system where a person completes an assessment form this is then approved by the social services department and a budget allocated which is paid into the persons bank account allowing them to source their care individually.It was for many reasons a failure (though these were little to do with the principle of the plan) and eventually it ran out of steam, but it was I felt ahead of its time.

So we have here a future where we have moved from a pre 1990 ACT situation where Local Authorities controlled every aspect of care from funding, assessment, management, provision of and to an extent regulation of services to a fully post-90 world where it funds care (in some cases) but to which all other functions have been delegated to individual service users, the private and voluntary sectors and an external regulator.

It may seem something of a distraction to discuss all this in terms of funding, but the way in which social care is organised and funded are more closely aligned than has been credited. For instance in a system like the one set out above where individuals are agreed to have greater responsibilities and where social services departments play a limited role in facilitating choice, rather than actually assessing for, regulating and providing services this allows a greater scope for the development of private insurance as social care becomes largely a financial issue with individual budgets also providing fertile ground for the growth of a much more extensive market in care services to replace what were local monopolies of state provided services.

The question increasingly asked will be should individuals plan for care needs in the same way as they are expected to for retirement? should they for instance take out private insurance. If so what should be the role of the state in facilitating this - should it make such insurance compulsory (such an idea was in fact mooted a few years ago), should it subsidise, incentivise or regulate this market? Most importantly would such a market function? We know the case of pensions is just as problematic with many being unable, or unwilling to save.

It seems the debate is simple, but the answers are not.

Why the purchaser/provider split is failing

2011-11-15T12:10:00.000-08:00

Well, It's been quite a while since I've posted anything.. my excuses...life has been quite busy starting a new job and am finishing a dissertation among other things.

I've just spotted an excellent article on the Guardian which seems to hit the spot over just what is wrong in social care - in fact it echos a lot of what I said today to a new colleague who as it turns out his wife used to do some of my training when I was still in Social Services. It has led to me to post a response which I'd like to share here...

This is the real scandal in social care

The purchaser/provider split which came in in the 1990 act (but which has really come to maturity in the past 5-8 years as LAs ditched functions like in-house care providers and res. care homes) allows LAs to focus on driving down fees without having to worry themselves about the details of how this is achieved, or what corners are being cut to do this.The problem as pointed out is that lack of money in the system turns the purchaser/provider split into a destructive force which eats itself; it's not about getting quality care for a competitive price, but just about securing the lowest possible price to protect the diminished budget.

What we have is a failing market which is seeing a race to the bottom in terms of care standards.

A massive, massive issue to me, as I was only talking about someone to today is that the purchaser/provider split allows LAs to delegate responsibility and accountability. For instance if there is a scandal in a care home operated by a LA then the head of service and cabinet member are directly accountable... if it's with a private provider then they can simply blame a greedy owner, or bad management and point to the role of CQC.

Being able to escape this direct acvcountability means LAs can turn a blind-eye to just how margins are being cut and the impact of real cuts in the cost of care.

And being cut they are. I can't speak for now, but I began in Social Care in 2004 when providers were being paid £15 per hour for care...... when I left in 2009 the avearage was more like £10-12 per hour.

The real scandal in social care

2011-10-04T07:53:00.000-07:00

I've always thought that an essential in any good system of social care provision is content staff.

Too often we ignore their needs and treat them as if they are invisible even if we're in the same room and I'll admit here that I've been as guilty as anyone else on a social services training course when the room divides into carers on one side and 'professionals' on the other. A few ex-colleagues of mine had worked, or even continued to work as carers, but this aside there was always to my view an element of snobbishness and power imbalance present in the many interactions between ourselves and carers.

Though a few of us did speak out about the conditions faced by carers it was a topic well down the list for us, far below issues like personalisation, or even the personality politics of the department.

But the treatment of carers is so integral to the system it should be the only issue we're talking about. Why? Well we really need to look at this holistically. If we want a system based on dignity and respect then that standard needs to apply to everyone. If care staff are treated with dignity and respect then we can in turn expect service users to be treated the same. Turning an indifferent eye to care staff being paid below the minimum wage endangers our ideals as much as mistreatment in a care home.

Can the welfare state withstand the global storm?

2011-09-23T04:55:00.000-07:00

Blimey! What is going on in the global economy? All this talk of double dips and lost decades (or is that just Shaun Ryder)is actually starting to make me worried now. No better make that terrified.

I'm also beginning to look for a job and have been astonished at the sheer number of people competing for positions. One recent post I applied for, nothing glam at all, had 180 applicants eagerly snapping away like some tabloid feeding frenzy.

What makes me worried is how will the welfare state, weakened by three decades of neo-liberal attacks hold out? Will it be shown to be woefully inadiquate and as easily overrun as the Maginot line?

Is the big society rhetoric like some eerie harbinger of a return to when Victorian liberal capitalism smashed its way unrestrained through lives as nonchelantly as the wind whipping autumn leaves into a swirling menace.

I suspect we'll be finding out soon.

PFI - Who didn't see this one coming?

2011-09-22T00:53:00.000-07:00

I've just read a piece on the BBC website about the strain repaying PFI projects is putting on the budget of NHS Trusts.

There is of course some political point-scoring going on, but honestly who can say that they didn't see this coming? PFI was obviously an ill-conceived idea from the beginning with controversy engulfing one of the first PFI's the Skye Bridge project which George Monbiot pointed to in his widely read 2001 Book 'Captive State; The Corporate Take Over of Britain'

Now the doubters have been proved right, but governments and local authorities still shock in their ability not to take heed of the facts when it comes to policy.

RIP Local Government

2011-09-13T16:57:00.001-07:00

I've just read in my local rag today that my local authority will be joining forces with another local council to provide services. Is this an issue? The reason is to save money, presumably through economies of scale so win-win?

What about local democracy though? The Authority I worked for only a couple of years back is barely recognisable today. Yes there's still a grand old building slap bang in the middle of the City, but it's emptying out fast. In Social Care the in-house provider has been scaled down and care homes sold off to BUPA, Housing benefit claims are now administered in Bromley, legal services and licencing are shared with a neighbouring authority and now there's plans on the table to merge services with yet another authority.

All this means people just don't know who runs what or who is responsible for what. In these new organisations opaqueness replaces transparency whilst democratically elected councillors seem increasingly irrelevant, just how much influence can they have over services in these public-private-voluntary sector hybrid super-councils? How much say do we have as voters? Or are we no longer voters, but simply customers?

Another care agency bites the dust

2011-08-31T15:27:00.000-07:00

My local rag reported this week that a care provider went out of business leaving clients in the lurch. Admittedly it was a small one with only about 20 clients in my area who were the story indicated fairly easily accomodated by one of the big providers (though no doubt a few people made a lot of phone calls, sent a lot of faxes and stayed in the office very late) so no real crisis, but could it be a canary? I'm not on the inside anymore, but I can take a guess that the trend of squeezing providers is still going on - probably even more so. Due to the strategy of our commissioning team the money we were paying for care fell about £5 an hour from £15 to around £10 in my time which was 2004-2009, but how sustainable is this system and who is paying the price? Being a labour intensive inustry the bulk of the £5 an hour will probably be wages so where does this leave care staff and what effect does it have on recruitment and retention?

The London Riots

2011-08-18T06:05:00.000-07:00

I was glued to the coverage in the way I used to be only on election nights, following the Guardian’s Live blog, flipping over to the BBC, waiting on every new development. The next day I was equally transfixed by the aftermath, the politicians posturing and discourses emerging; on the right it was about parenting, fecklessness and ‘criminality pure and simple’ and on the left it was about the cuts and alienated youth.

Facebook was also aglow with debate raging through the night and into the next morning. One ex-coursemate from my Sociology degree years posted a theory that the panoptican effect of CCTV has been shown for the sham it is. I personally weighed in with the view that it was all connected to Saskia Sassen’s global cities theory which states that key global cities have been shaped by global capital flows and money markets into highly unequal and polarised places. I reasoned that this created underlying tensions which have possibly been exasperated by the financial crisis. The question I pondered was; is it a coincidence that as the money markets meltdown, so a key point in the global financial system burns?

One thing which struck me especially as a particularly opportunistic bit of behaviour (not unlike that shown by many of the looters I must add) was the attempts by some associated with the police to take back what they see as lost ground with some talking heads complaining about how the ‘force’ is now regarded as being hamstrung by human rights considerations and is now more a ‘service’ now neutered and ineffective. What was needed they insinuated was a force unafraid to get out there and crack some skulls as this extract from the August 11th edition of the New York Times shows:

A former senior riot police officer with knowledge of current operations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that the most recent riots were allowed to rage, in part, because police officers felt constrained. They operated, the former officer said, in the shadow of the case of a newspaper vendor, Ian Tomlinson, who died after being shoved by a riot officer guarding against protesters at a Group of 20 economic conference in 2009. The police officer, Simon Harwood, will go on trial for manslaughter in October.

I find this whole argument particularly difficult to swallow for a number of reasons. Chiefly the whole notion that police officers cannot tell the difference between reasonable force and what constitutes an illegal action is laughable. If they cannot tell the difference then what hope is there for the rest of us?

More specifically with regard to the Tomlinson case. My reading of the case was that the Officer PC Simon Harwood who was assigned to be in effect ‘in the rear with the gear’ by his own admission became 'bored' and then went walkabout with disastorous effect. This was not disciplined policing and in fact questions had been raised about Harwood's 'aggressive behaviour' long before the G20 protests.

The police are not the only ones using the smoke of the riots as cover for a political agenda as Cameron's attempts at turning the welfare state into a more punative part of the criminal justice system testfies, but the arguement that cases like the Tomlinson case have stopped them doing their job does the police a disservice. I hope that PC Harwood is not representative of the majority of officers who can tell the difference between doing their job and breaking the law.

Losing touch

2011-08-07T04:30:00.000-07:00

It's surprising how quickly we can lose touch with things. It's coming up for two years since I left social services to enable me to study for a masters in social policy and whilst for the first year I kept in touch with the department and the wider world of social care this year has been different. I've lost touch with all but one former colleague and also feel out of touch with developments in the field as I no longer have a view from the ground. Incidentally I'm sure this is also something which is experienced by many senior managers.

So amongst all this it was nice to catch-up with an old colleague last week. They themselves left last year to pursue a social work degree after a number of years as an unqualified care-manager. I was curious about what they made of their experiences so far as in the past I've questioned just how well a social work degree prepares someone for what is a hugely demanding and complex role.

Their view was suitably mixed. They felt that there was indeed a gap between the ideal of the theory they were taught in the classroom and what actually happened in practice, but they also felt that what they had learnt had been valuble in enabling them to improve upon their practice.

Overall this left me feeling much better about the relavance of the social work degree, but it does illustrate what a strange area social care is more than any other as it is caught between idealism and pragmitism. As a worker the course of action which you feel best meets the text-book ideal must always be balanced against the limitations imposed by the availability of funds, the amount of time available to work on any one case, or the state of the local care market.

I was surprised to hear though that many newly qualified social workers have found it difficult to secure a job. Being out of touch I just don't know how the cuts are affecting my old department, but always thought that we had been running with unfilled vacancies for so long that it wouldn't be possible to cut anymore. As I said to my old colleague, as we well knew from experience, the job doesn't go away no matter how few people there are to deal with it the work never ever dries up. It's not as if it is a factory which can just slow-down it's production line. Just how are people coping I thought, is staying behind until 10pm becoming more routine than extraordinary I asked? I just can't imagine how it would work with less people.

My friend was also unsure, but one thing they did know was that the uncertain job market meant that the competition for the best placements was intensifying. They told me that you really need a placement with a local authority unless you want an uphill struggle to find work once you qualify.

The end of the council care home

2011-07-12T08:20:00.000-07:00

My big break in care management came as a result of care home closures. Having been in a junior role doing phone assessments I was seconded to cover a colleague who was in turn seconded to assess and arrange new placements for residents at two council run homes which were earmarked for closure. Initially it was for a six month period, but legal wrangling led to me providing cover for another three months before I finally left to study social policy.

The closures were fought against by the local rag and residents relatives, at one point a hot-shot lawyer who had fought another authority on the issue of care home closures appeared on the scene seeking to halt the process. I remember the colleague I replaced telling me that she felt all this was counter-intuiative as the authority was so keen to close the homes had been exceedingly generous in allocating funds for the residents who were to be moved.

The homes in question were typical of council residential homes built as part of a post-war council estate its homes and care homes founded same impulses of idealism and universality. One was well regarded, the other not so. In my dealings it seemed the issues were typical ones down to not having enough staff and there had been a spat the year before when the authority decided to bring in agency staff to avoid paying overtime breaking a tacit agreement that low pay would be compensated by opportunities to work long hours.

In any case the authority got its way and shut the homes. To the cynic it seemed the authority just didn't want the hassle of trying to run homes on a progressively tightening budget, far better to outsource this problem and any ramifications to the private sector. To my ultra cynical eye I felt that senior management were concerned about the escalating potential for a safeguarding case to crop up at a council run care home, something that would be much worse for them professionally than an equivalent one in a private-sector home.

Maybe this wasnt the case, the official line was that demand was declining (in the short term at least) and that the private sector had ample capacity, there was now simply no need for the homes they said. That they set up a new safeguarding team specifically to deal with institutional safeguarding cases suggested that their faith in the private sector was however, not absolute.

I wonder what their thoughts are this week?

Winterbourne View: Deja-vu

2011-06-07T12:17:00.000-07:00

In social care it seems to feel as if we were in a world of never ending change, departments and organisational structures come and go, shifting around, merging and splitting like amoebas. People come and go and new ways of doing things come in vogue before being replaced by the next big idea which older colleagues usually observe is the very idea which the last big idea was meant to replace.

Despite this continual flux some things seem to remain the same even when we don't want them to. This week I've been reminded of a course I attended, maybe as long as 6 or 7 years ago. The course was titled 'Adult Abuse Awareness' which perhaps dates it as the professional terminology has long since evolved so the course is now named 'Safeguarding Adults Awareness'. The course ran for three days and was attended by staff from across the authority; carers, social workers, care managers and people like me who at the time just answered the phone.

As part of the couse we watched part of a documentary which had been recently aired and where adults with a learning disability in a care home in a neighbouring authorities area had experienced abuse which had centered around the totally unjustified use of physical restraint. The footage also included a scene where one resident had had water thrown over them. I'm reminded of this by the reports of the abuse at Winterbourne View, where according to the Guardian article

The BBC's Panorama programme used an undercover reporter to film patients being pinned down, slapped, doused in cold water and repeatedly taunted.

Unfortunately dspite a google search I cannot find any details of the programme we saw on the course. Any Google search is foxed by the sheer weight of similar cases (just type in 'care home closed down' for a litany of cases), but the thing which troubles me is that despite the publicity and furore over that now forgotten case we are once again hearing the same story years later despite the best efforts of numerous professionals.

For the person running my awareness course, a former front-line Social Worker, the problem was the type of people attracted to jobs in care homes were those who 'enjoyed having power over other people'. Problems like the ones we've seen at Winterbourne were according to this view the result of something deeply embedded. I acually heard a similar kind of arguement made in a Radio 4 interview by the authour of a book 'scapegoat' who suggested that 'institutional violence' was a longstanding problem going back hundreds of years and for adults with a learning disability the stark choice is between abuse either in institutions or in the community.

The problem therefore is one which the whole of society needs to face. Our attitudes to disability, in particular to learning disability need to be transformed. My trainer all those years ago was optimistic about the prospects for the future beleiving that the greater incidences of adult abuse were the result not of increased prevelance, but of a greater willingness of staff and various others to report abuse which would previously have gone undetected. In other words attitudes had begun to change.

Hopefully this optimism wasn't misplaced.

Social Care is Failing..

2011-05-30T02:36:00.000-07:00

... this is according to some Age UK research which has just been published and reported in the Guardian today.

This isn't news to me and probably isn't news to any of you either. It's painfully obvious to anyone who has been involved with the sector in recent years that things need to change.

In fact my, and I'm sure other peoples main opposition to Individual budgets, was that for all the positives around the policy it never dealt with the core issue which was lack of funds - which as the article points too is really the key issue.

It seems that on this issue (and not dissimilar to university funding) there have so far only been sticking plaster soloutions; Politicians ducking out of the big debates. These debates are chiefly who pays and how? It seems that paying for anything from general taxation is out of vogue so we have what I call the 'making a contribution' society - that is responsibility for social risks (i.e poor health; unemployment etc) being increasingly placed on inividuals.

Some time ago a kind of insurance model was mooted for social care this it seems has dissapeared from the agenda, but as the Age UK research shows things need to be addressed sooner rather than later.

The Military Covenant

2011-05-19T06:27:00.000-07:00

The relationship between the military and the welfare state has always been close. In fact its closer than close - the Welfare state owes it's existence to what we are now beginning to term 'the military covenant'. Historians of social policy will tell you that out of the first world war emerged one of the first real attempts made by the state to provide mass housing fit for the troops returning from the trenches; the 'Homes fit For Heroes' scheme - the snappy giving away the political currency it was hoped the project would bestow on its sponsors. Ultimately 'Homes fit for Heroes' was criticised along with other attempts at post-war social reform for not going far enough and It was not until the destruction reaped by a second global conflict, world war two, that Western governments instituted much more ambitious plans, the full-blown welfare-state a conscious and determined effort to build a 'new Jerusalem' a society worthy of the sacrifices made in its name.

Gradually the post-war settlement of 1945 has been eroded, weathered by the harsh winds of time. The idea of the state guaranteeing social rights to its citizens has been overturned to the point where more and more individuals are asked to make a more of a contribution whether this is an 18 year old student being asked to pay £9k a year to cover fees or an 88 year old grandmother being forced to sell her home to pay for the cost of residential care. It is in these terms which the current debates around instituting the military covenant into law are couched; Priority in housing, priority in NHS treatment. Gone is the commitment to universal citizenship and universal social rights, gone is the commitment to honour sacrifice by building a worthy society. No one would deny troops who have made so many sacrifices the best medical treatment, decent housing, or any other social right but we must not forget these are rights which extend to all and to which others can justly make claims to; the firefighter, the nurse, the teacher, the mother. Does a soldier returning from conflict wish to receive the very best whilst watching their parents receive an appalling level of care from an underfunded system? Only by recognising this need to create a fairer and more just society for all as we did in 1945 do we properly honour their sacrifice.

Delivering care

2011-04-29T05:05:00.000-07:00

Immediately before working in social care I spent a long summer working for Royal Mail. Most of my routes were in a semi-rural area and despite my anxiety that I was wasting my newly achieved 2:2 it was looking back probably the most relaxing enjoyable job I have ever had; even the occasional rainy days weren't so bad.

Hearing stories about Royal Mail these days I wonder how much the job has changed, in particular I wonder about one of my former colleagues who was always cheerful and always smiling as he simply loved the job. I hope that's still the case, or else he's somewhere else where he's enjoying work, but reading this article in the Guardian about the poor conditions and low-pay within the privatised and liberalised postal service in Holland I do worry what the future holds for employees such as my old colleague.

I mention this all, not by means of reminiscence as I currently grind out a day-time living in the call-centre and nocturnal existence writing essays on research methodologies, but because the conclusion of the article struck a chord:

In this competition the power lies with the few, whose priority is cheapness, rather than the many, whose priority is regularity and universality; cheapness wins, and it is the postal workers who suffer.

Such a passage could easily be applied to care workers. Since the NHS and Community Care act created the purchaser/provider split local government commissioners have prioritised cheapness driving down the cost of both residential and non-residential care. In a labour-intensive industry it has been workers who have paid the biggest price.

Should we worry? Yes. Well-paid and well-respected staff members contribute to a better service. Another reason is that social care is up there at the vanguard having for a combination of reasons moved furthest, fastest when it comes to liberalising welfare markets. The question we really need to ask is do we want to see the social care model replicated in the NHS?

Mutuals: A blueprint for the future?

2011-04-20T15:24:00.000-07:00

According to a recent article in the Guardian the Government are very much in favour of 'mutuals' this is the process where public servants can club together and effectively opt-out of the public sector.

As a former public servant I must say I always felt that myself and my colleagues could do a better job than our senior managers who seemed to be handpicked for their ability to lurch from crisis to crisis whilst maintaining a veneer of optimism.

The idea of mutuals trouble me though. Much of my interest at university (in fact I'm currently in negotiations about a potential Phd on this very topic) is around how organisational characteristics impact on the public service ethos; in other words is the profit motive found in the private sector inconsistent with public service ethos of the voluntary and public sectors? The answer you may be surprised to hear is that it is not necessarily the case, in fact the opposite may be true; that is in some circumstances for-profit organisations may contribute the public good more effectively that the private or public sectors.

This view is against conventional wisdom, but a great example is provided by the Body Shop. Seen as left-field and pioneering when they were first set up the virtues they champion have been absorbed into the mainstream. All that within a for-profit model which would have been inconceivable in the voluntary or public sector. I am aware that I have defended the public service ethos of the public sector in the past and my views have not necessarily changes, I still beleive that the public sector possesses a particular strength in this aspect, but rather I am more pragmatic about which sectors should deliver services. the way I see it is very much a case of 'horses for courses'; in some instance the public sector is best, in others the qualities of the private or voluntary sectors can be better.

The problems however, centre around the pressures such 'mutuals' may find themselves under. It appears they will be a hybrid of all three sectors and will need to balance public service with profit making. The example given in the article of Cleveland Fire Brigade presents one example; on one hand the organisation has a public service committment committed to providing services to the public, but this will need to be balanced against profit making activities. This means decisions will need to be made in the future as to how best to allocate resources, should a fireman be on standby in case of a fire, or would it be better if he/she was off conducting a paid consultancy to bring in extra cash. This is not far fetched speculation, but a real issue as in the voluntary sector the issue of 'mission drift'; that is abandoning an organisations core mission to chase the funding on offer has become a real and recognised issue in the voluntary sector, first through a glut of funding opportunities and latterly through a scarcity of funding.

The answer to these dilemmas is that there should be a level of accountability, but accountability to who? Local councillors perhaps, but what if an organisations area of operation overlaps several authorities boundaries then who takes the lead and is local government really an effective tool for this? In addition the more mutuals there are, the harder it is to trace accountability. In the NHS and public services as they stand there is a clear chain of command. Numerous mutuals operating in different areas may well be hard to keep track of and their opaqueness could prevent accountability from the public and local media.

I do beleive that there is a case for challenging the monopoly of the public sector, but any moves need to be done with extreme caution and lessons learnt from the experience of transferring services from the public to voluntary sector.

The rotten state of residential care

2011-04-15T16:30:00.000-07:00

Well it seems a Social Care story has finally appeared...

Southern Cross Healthcare who own and operate 31 000 residential homes are in serious financial difficulty. The chairman has quit and the firm is threatened with possible insolvency.

According to the Guardian article Southern Cross came unstuck due to greed:

The company's problems stem from heady expansion when it was owned by the US private equity group Blackstone, which undertook the sale and leaseback of homes to bankroll a number of expensive acquisitions. Many leaseback agreements included upward-only rent reviews of up to 2.6% annually.

As the article also explains whilst this may have seemed like a good idea at the time it doesn't seem so good in the face of local government cutbacks. I know my old authourity a couple of years back went with a 1% increase in the maximum funding levels two years in a row, and for all I know this situation probably continued after I left. What this means is that as far as local authority clients went a company like Southern Cross could only expect the price they received per resident to rise by 1% Makes those 2.6% rent reviews seem like a very bad idea indeed.

But, isn't that the way markets work? Risk and Reward. Southern Cross won't be the first firm to have collapsed after overstretching itself to meet ambitious targets. Maybe we could shrug it off if it wasn't for the following passage of the article:

Paul Saper, chief executive of LCS International, the healthcare consultants, said that the cash-strapped group had not "invested properly in some of its homes, with doors falling off the hinges at some properties". He added that, a year ago, about 40 of the company's homes faced embargos from the regulator and that several had been the target of enforcement orders linked to issues such as hygiene and standards of safety.

This is the crucial difference. The state of the residential care sector affects lives; the lives of residents, of staff and of families. This episode serves as a reminder of just how rotten things are in the sector and just how thoroughly rotten the whole system is.

I don't think many people in social care would rush to defend the status quo. In the one corner we have the capitalists seeking to make a profit, in the other we have local authorities keen to cut costs.

Between these two implulses the standard of care in the sector, particularly for those least able to top-up with their own resources, is being driven down. Residents are put at risk and staff are expected to do a tough and demanding job for a pittance and without the right support and training.

There is an irony here that in the event of Southern Cross folding Local Authorities, most of whom have spent the past few years closing down their own homes to a great deal of local resistance, may well end up taking on responsibility for the homes.

A quiet time

2011-04-11T12:10:00.000-07:00

A hectic schedule and a problem with internet access have conspired to prevent me from posting anything really meaningful over recent weeks, but is it just me or is the world of social care a rather quiet one right now?

The media is a fickle beast; like a channel-surfing teenager it has a short attention span rapidly flicking between channels to create some sort of post-modern collage. One second we're getting all worked up debating the big society, individual budgets and disability benifits and suddenly the channel is changed. A complete break. We're now talking about NHS reforms. The rest will have to wait patiently until events; a speech, confrence, report or scandal lead the media to return with our collective attention once again.

Just how well thought through is Government policy?

2011-04-03T00:55:00.000-07:00

Just how well is policy thought out. If the current Tuition fee debacle is anything to go by then the answer has to be very badly if at all.

Just take one paragraph from the guardian today which tellingly says:

The number of universities declaring that they wish to charge students the highest amount from next year has caught ministers by surprise, with the majority of institutions planning to charge more than £7,500 a year.

Now, I clearly remember government representatives on television stating that there would be a wide range in terms of fees charged by institutions and that students would be able to then make a choice from this range. Let me just say that the commodification of education is not something I condone at all, in fact it is something I vigourously oppose, but also worryingly it seems that if ministers have got it this wrong on what is comparitively a rather simple market to analyse then what does this say about the basis of policy in other areas such as around social care a much more complex entity.

And the reason why universities are charging high fees... It's because they know demand will still be there even if they charge students extortionate rates. Why? Because university still represents chasing the dream to most young people. It is still seen as virtually the only the route to a career, home-ownership and the middle class. Universities know, even if ministers don't that with few alternatives, people will be prepared to pay for this dream.

Communication strategies.

2011-03-19T07:37:00.000-07:00

I've been planing to write about technology and social care for a few weeks now. I'm still formulating that one, but once again something written on the topic (in the Guardian as ever) has caught my attention and forced my hand. It was a call to harness the power of the Internet to aid communication between organisations and service users more of whom the article assumes will be using individual budgets.

The crux of the article is summarised neatly in one paragraph:

Complimenting this is the interaction between organisations and their clients, cementing online communication as superior to other mediums. The modern Internet holds the potential for service providers to reassure people by offering easy, quick and cheap methods of communication. Being able to receive and respond to feedback, offer online advice and allow vulnerable people to apply for help from their homes are now basic communication requirements in an inter-connected world.

As the commenter's (myself included) point out there are many issues around using the Internet, not least the fact that certain groups have greater access to it than others; Though the article suggests that more people, particularly in the older persons bracket are getting online, the phrase 'digital divide' still seems apt. Another issue is that in my experience for social care email is quite possibly the worst form of communication. Mainly because the conversation is one sided making it very hard to make a quick assessment of a situation. Much more preferable is a telephone call allowing you to get much more info in a shorter time as well as judging a persons state from their tone of voice; scared, upset, confused? Not so easy to tell by email. Top of the tree is a face-to-face visit where you can read a whole set of non-verbal cues and see a person in their surroundings.

The one thing the article does get right is that email is a cheap method of communication. I know a few years ago some authorities still visited almost everyone who asked for assistance to carry out a face-to-face assessment, but it became increasingly common to find 'contact centres' being set up where initial assessment was done by telephone, with some being 'screened-out' so never receiving a visit. Undoubtedly this trend was driven by a need to stretch resources so its quite possible that email or self-assessment via a website will prove hard to resist for cash strapped authority's and rather than helping "people feel closer to those who provide key services" it erects yet another barrier between them.

It's not that I'm some kind of Luddite. I believe that the Internet and email does have a valuable role to play in social care however, as usual I have a number of concerns. Just a couple of years ago for instance my authority announced it was phasing out information leaflets; those ones you see in racks on the wall of a GP's surgery waiting area, or just inside the door of a community centre. It reasoned that they were a costly and inefficient way of communicating with people, so save for a couple they were to be only available on the website in PDF format. In part the authority had a case, keeping the leaflets up to date was a costly exercise (also arguably environmentally unfriendly) and there was no control over the numbers of out-of-date leaflets in various locations all with the wrong information and old phone numbers belonging to teams which have since been re-organised at least 5 times. They also decided to pahse-out the leaflets in various languages, again they could well have had a point as in the office we did have a filing cabinet bursting with leaflets in Polish which never saw the light of day due to there being no demand for them. The councils proposal was that instead translations of all the leaflets would be carried out on request.

Clearly, apart from the cash saving, none of this been thought through. What if people don't have Internet access, and will people at possibly the most vulnerable time in their lives manage to navigate the complexities of a councils web site to find the right leaflet, or is it more likely that they'll spot it in a GP's surgery? Yet again an assumption has been made that the service user is an informed consumer just like someone shopping around for the best car insurance deal when often this is not the case. As for the language issue the situation is even worse. The piles of unused leaflets were not the problem, rather they were the symptom of a wholesale failure to engage with minority communities, particularly the most vulnerable among them; making leaflets only available on request (along with pulling funding from the jointly funded post of a sensory services minority outreach worker and cutting funding for neighbourhood advice centres - where face-to face advice and information leaflets both in a range of languages were easily available) would make matters much worse than they already were.

Fortunately I did notice a leaflet recently in a GP's surgery so unless its an out of date one there may well have been a u-turn on the leaflet policy. I hope so as for all it's promised advantages we need to be careful that new technology does not mean people are left behind.

When is a social worker not a social worker...

2011-03-10T02:40:00.000-08:00

When is a social worker not a social worker? Apparently the answer is when they're impersonating one as Tracey Smith, an 'unqualified assistant social worker' found to her cost resulting in a conviction and fine of £230. I won't dwell on the particulars as it's all in the original Guardian article, but just to say the deception seems to have been mainly based around job references and CV 'creativity'in which she had claimed to have been a social worker.

Ethically this is rather dubious and of course not defensible in any way, but I wonder if the question over what is a social worker is quite so clear-cut. I always remember my first day working for social services; being shown around my biggest shock was that most people were not social workers, in fact apart from the team manager there was only one qualified social worker in a front-line team of 12-15 people. The rest held job titles ranging from admin to information officer, contact assessor and unqualified care manager.

One thing which struck me about my time in public service was the importance attached to job titles. For every visiting professional, dignitary or student social worker we introduced ourselves in turn by name and job title. Each title had a carefully worked out job role courtesy of HR and fitted into a well defined pay structure, not to mention office hierarchy as hilariously demonstrated by this Clare in the Community cartoon (Scroll down to October the 10th).

Despite their importance within the organisation, to the general public such distinctions didn't matter, most would differentiate between admin and a social worker, but almost all, like I had before I joined, just assumed that everyone else was a social worker. Sometimes though this assumption would break down. My first role was answering the telephone, the system broadly operated in the following way: I would take down a persons details and an outline of their particular problem then pass this onto the social-worker who would then call them back or put the form in a tray for one of the other unqualified workers to deal with. Occasionally I would be asked if I was a social worker...

Caller: are you a social worker?

Me: No, I'm a receptionist

Caller: So you can't help me then?

Me: I can see if I can help you, would I be able to take some details from you, then I'll pass them onto the social worker?

Caller: No, I need to speak to the social worker. Now.

Me (to social worker) Umm, I've got someone who says they want to speak to you.

Social Worker: I'm busy I'm afraid, tell them I'll call them back. Take some details.

Pretty much whenever the assumption that I was a social worker broke down the whole system went out the window.

So this poses an interesting question, I was not impersonating a social worker, but to do my job I was relying on peoples assumptions that I was a social worker. My bosses I hasten to add were fully aware of this fact as I told them this many times. Eventually my old job role of answering the phone was shipped out to Capita, would people then stop assuming they were speaking to a social worker when they called in? every so often we'd be told by someone, sometimes even from a professional, that they had spoken to a 'social worker' the day before when in fact the person they had spoken to was based in the call-centre.

Aside from all this within the organisation, job roles though strictly defined on paper also have a habit, especially in times of staff shortages, of developing grey areas round the edges. I've seen safeguarding adults work being done by what we called 'unqualifieds' and it's also not unusual for a newly qualified social worker in a small team to be under the wing of a more experienced but unqualified worker for up to a year.

It was all brought home to me when I was having a conversation with a French Canadian chap and his girlfriend in a hostel on the continent. We were talking about our jobs over dinner. I had described my day-to-day job role to them, but the girlfriend had struggled with some of the language and terms I was using. She asked her boyfriend to help interpret. I picked out two words among what he told her....... 'social worker'

Gadaffi and the LSE

2011-03-08T15:49:00.000-08:00

This may of course just be an isolated case, but am I alone in wondering whether the much vaunted and terminally embarrasing link between Gaddafi regime and the LSE rings alarm bells when it comes to the plans of exposing much more of the public sector to market imperitives and the influence of filthy lucre?

The Cameron Plan

2011-02-23T17:08:00.000-08:00

If you want to know what Cameron's vision of the future for public services looks like you could do a lot worse than to read this BBC news piece

The plan isn't a particularly revolutionary one; it's more of a continuation down the path we started out on with the 1990 NHS and Community Care Act. The legislation which instituted the purchaser provider split.

The state, under Cameron's plan becomes like a referee. Its role setting out and enforcing the rules which govern interactions between all the players. If you want to know how this will work the model is taken from the utility privitisations where the states continued interests are represented by industry regulators such as Ofgem

Putting such a system in place is no real practical challenge, but it is a philosophical one. The chief issue is what happens to the public service ethos, can it survive a run in with the profit motive?

What if..... the 'Big Society' worked

2011-02-16T12:12:00.000-08:00

Just for a second, if I shut my eyes tightly enough, I can imagine a world where the 'Big Society' works (This is despite coming to the end of the excellent 'The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone' which convincingly argues that the level of inequality in the UK and U.S is a major impediment for a sharing and cooperative society). Yes, I can force myself into a state of optimism. I can see innovations like the Ministry of Stories and other stories of individuals and groups being creatively empowered to improved services.

It seems to me that we are all too focused on the many reasons why the 'Big Society' will not work that we are failing to considering what will happen if it does work.
When I say 'work' this is of course somewhat subjective as if the plan does take off I am far from optimistic.

The reason for this is that there are two visions of what may happen if the 'Big Society' idea really gets off the ground. The first is the vision of 'bungling amateurs' which Francis Maude may be relaxed about, but as someone with five years experience in social care I can say I am definately terrified about. Even providing basic services is a complex matter and if something either goes wrong, or more likely something is omitted then the consequences can be dire indeed.

It is however, not just failiure that is the problem. Success is perhaps an even bigger issue for the 'Big Society'. According to the market logic of the likes of Maude, good services will flourish whilst poor ones will disappear through lack of demand. That this can be a problem may seem counter-intuitive; after all if services improve that can only be a good thing, right? The problem though is that when it comes to applying the supply and demand economics of the market to the voluntary and community sector there is a key difference. As Harvard Business School academics James Austin, Howard Stevenson and Jane Wei-Skillern point out both sectors have very different opportunity structures:

In comparing the nature of opportunities in the commercial and social sectors, clearly, there are abundant opportunities in the latter relative to the former. The demand for social entrepreneurial programmes and services usually far exceed the capacity of the social enterprises to serve these needs. Initial successes often lead to increased demand for the social enterprise's programmes, products or services, or even requests to scale or replicate the organization in some form. For many employees and for the outside funders, the growth imperitive often becomes paramount.

So unlike the commercial sector the demmand for services provided by the voluntary and community sector is virtually unlimited. On the face of it this would seem to suggest the need for an initiative like the 'Big Society', but the academics warn the pressures to meet the sheer scale of demand can be detrimental to voluntary and community organisations:

In some cases, growth may not be the best approach to achieve the organization's goals or to have the greatest social impact. Growth for the sake of growth has the potential to squander organizational resources and can actually detract from the organization's overall impact.

This leaves succesful organisations in a bind. Although Austin, Stevenson and Wei-Skillern are not saying that growth is intrinsically a bad thing, they provide a reminder that growth is not necessarily a logical outcome for a succesful organisation. This suggestion ties in with the view expressed by former Shelter Chief Executive Adam Sampson that some charities had grown too large, buracratic, commercial and in the process distant from their beneficiaries in a way which was threatening to undermine the sectors claims to distinctiveness.

This issue boils down to this. If voluntary organisations grow they may in the process of restructuring lose what it was which made them succesful in the first place, but if they choose to remain the same size they must cope with huge levels of demand which they could not possibly hope to meet. How do voluntary organizations cope with excess demand? The market mechanism of increasing price is out of reach to them, so they must choose between having a huge waiting list or develop criteria. The role of the criteria is simply to discriminate between who receives a service and who does not. This could be based on an assessment of need, on geographic residence criteria, financial circumstances, or any other combination of measurable characteristics. In some circumstances criteria my be formal, but in some cases it has been shown that informal arbitary rationing criteria have been used by voluntary ortganisations keen to safeguard limited resources.

What this all leaves is an opaque system where a person in need must approach multiple organisations and satisfy various sets of criteria, becoming as one academic, Caroline Knowles, referred to as "welfare Nomads"; persons spending the day wandering from location to location to piece together a patchwork quilt of support.

Set this against a backdrop of a welfare-state in retreat and you have a potentially toxic combination should the 'Big Society' actually work.

Big Society Fortnight

2011-02-13T12:52:00.000-08:00

I've decided that this is now going to be big society fortnight(backdated to last week). It's been a such a long time since I've had so much to say on one topic and I know I'm not the only one as apparently at the Uni some big-name academics also came together to hold a debate. When I heard this I reflected that it was curious why we're all now devoting so much time to what most of us seem to beleive was just an election gimmick, but here we are and the discussion goes on....

It seems that all of us, even Dave himself, reached a consensus last week; namely that the cuts dished out to the voluntary and community sector by town halls across the country seemed to be anomolous to the aims of the 'big society' programme.

Sensing that the policy was on the verge of turning on its heels and running, to be ruthlesley pursued by the oppositions cavalry it seems the Government will this week be attempting to set a rallying point. Some of the details which have been announced featured in the Guardian over the weekend. Though I am tempted to pick it apart in minute detail I will restrict myself to commenting briefly on the main features.

Firstly there is the announcement that a £100m fund will be available to enable "charities" and "social enterprises" to "compete" for government contracts. Also available will be £200 million in loans from high street banks.

My first impression is, what's new? This is something which was being done under the last Government through programmes such as Change Up and Futurebuilders. I also wonder how the £100 million figure measures up to the cutbacks. As I have previously mentioned in my area alone £400k is expected to be shaved off the main Day Care services contract(currently provided by a nonprofit) alongside 700k or so in funding for voluntary sector organisations in the area. These figures are also per year, it is not clear in the article how many years the £100 million will be spread over. The Guardian piece does rather well in dealing with the issue of the £200 million from the banks, which it states will be on a commercial basis, and again, what's particularly new about this? There has been nothing stopping a non-profit organisation seeking finance in this way before.

A key feature of Cameron's defence of the big society has been how it embodies a philosophy of bottom-up as opposed to top-down action. Leaving aside the fact that this is quite a paradox for a policy being pushed by central government I wonder how the above funding arrangements fit with this philosophy. The reason I ask this is that the current round of local government cuts are likely to bring into question the viability of small locally based voluntary organisations as opposed to large regional or national organisations which will have more diverse funding streams. It is these small organisations which are often credited with being closer to their beneficiaries wheras larger organisations have been critiqued for becoming too buracratic and distant from their beneficiaries I also wonder how shifting the decisions over which charities to fund from democratically elected local authourities to high street banks and central government quangos is in keeping with the bottom-up philosophy?

Something which also seems to run counter to this is the whole process surrounding the 5000 'big society' workers and the establishing of what looks like a central college with what seems to be remit for deciding on a curriculum for a set of community work qualifications. All this at a time when Community Development Workers across the country are in fear of their jobs and department budgets. If this does not smack of top-down centralisation I really don't know what does!

BBC on the Big Society

2011-02-07T10:25:00.000-08:00

It amused me to come across this article on the BBC website as it makes some very similar points on the big society to those appearing on the pages of this very blog and comments I have made elsewhere!

The general theme of the piece is that whilst Government is encouraging the idea that the voluntary sector should play an increasingly prominent role in delivering services Local Government budget cuts are actually undermining the capacity of the sector to be able to deliver.

Especially interesting is the following passage dealing with the Governments response to these points:

Asked about the criticism that there was no strategic plan, Cabinet Office mnister Francis Maude told the BBC: "We're not going to dictate from the centre what every local authority should do. They must be accountable to their local communities."

He said three quarters of voluntary organisations got no state funding so would not be affected by council cuts.

Firstly this seems like a clear case of buck passing. Having worked for a local authourity in the past it was clear to me that Local Authorities have very little room for maneuvre. Most of what they do is prescribed by statute or dictated by central-governemt. With barely enough funding to do what is required of them Local Councils main concern is simply one of survival; a case of figuring how to put food on the plate, not making an informed choice between steak and chips or cod and chips. In other words local authourities whatever their persuasion or outlook will seek to cut soft targets; libraries and funding for local voluntary organisations.

The second point I really must take issue with is the figure quoted that 3/4 of voluntary organisations receive no state funding. This may be true, but it does not account for the size of voluntary organisations which vary enourmously from a one room operation consisting of a handful of people, to a national organisation such as Shelter, or a multinational like Greenpeace. Organisations also do differnt activities in different policy areas; not all directly provide services, some provide office support to other organisations, some engage in advocacy and others may act as umbrella groups. So it is not really possible to compare organisations on an individual basis. It may well be more likely that it is the organisations most involved with service provision that are in receipt of state funding.

The 'big society': Returning to the 1970s

2011-02-03T02:42:00.000-08:00

It's been a tough week for the 'big society' first Lord Wei the man dubbed the 'big society Tszar' finds that volunteering is incompatable with the pressures of work and family life, but perhaps more importantly it seems charities will be hit hard by cuts made by local authourities.

The importance of central and local government funding of the voluntary sector cannot be understated. It has been this which has been the key driver behind the sectors growth for over a decade not other factors such as the scale of volunteering which has in some instances actually been in decline according to the academic Ingo Bode.

As I mentioned in my previous post in my area the outlook for the voluntary sector couldn't appear any more grim with the authourity itself recognising the devestating impact their cuts are likely to have on the sector.

"All voluntary sector contracts which are identified as providing non
statutory preventative services are included and will be ended. The
loss of these services will impact on later costs where early
intervention would have reduced service need. Such cuts may
result in some organisations becoming unviable which will impact
on their use by other areas of the Council and partner
organisations."

Day Care in my area is a great example of this, currently the bulk of the Day Care service is provided by a nonprofit organisation who are contracted by the authourity. This funding is likely to be cut to the tune of £400k. Another organisation which runs and Asian elders day centre also faces the total withdrawl of their funding.

How likely is it that voluntary organisations will make up the shortfall and be able to survive on the resources of the community and volunteers alone? Even if their survival were ensured could current standards and levels of provision be maintained, or would voluntary organisations need to strictly ration access to their services.

The ideal of the big society with its strong appeal to nostalgia may point to a time when communities, individuals and groups did come together to provide services, but such nostalgia is misplaced. As ACEVO chief Stephen Bubb pointed out government funding and an increasingly professional voluntary sector have been responsible for raising standards. It is, as Bubb mentions, quite right that we would not wish to return to the kind of services provided in the 1970s.

With cuts in government funding to the voluntary sector this though is exactly what the 'big society' will mean.

Day Care part 2

2011-01-30T11:28:00.000-08:00

It seems the writing is on the wall for Day Care in my area. A council document published on the website of a local paper projects a budget saving of £400 000 from 'reviewing' the service which reading between the lines involves reducing demand through a two pronged strategy of individual budgets and tightening up eligibility criteria.

This can probably be achieved as there are probably a fair few people going to Day Centre who strictly speaking wouldn't meet the eligibility criteria as it stands today. I remeber in my time assessing people for this service I had the unenviable task of explaining to a lady why she couldn't have a second day at the Day Centre despite the fact that other people had three days there. Quite simply the bar for the service has been raised year-on-year and Care Managers doing reviews don't like taking services away as this involves potential for conflict with the service user and the risk of getting things wrong not to mention more paperwork. This created a two-tier system where existing service users assessed in more lenient times had their privelages maintained whilst potential new ones had to meet much tougher criteria which often saw people with possibly greater levels of need being turned down for services.

This two-tier nature of the system is bad in itself, but also problematic is what happens to people who now don't now meet the eligibility criteria. Will they be able to obtain the service elsewhere? The answer is probably not, if a person isn't eligible for Day Care under FACS (Fair Access to Care Services)they won't be eligible for an Individual Budget either. Can they obtain the services from the voluntary sector? Possibly however, this depends where a person lives and whether they have the resources to access transport. Groups which do exist tend to meet on a fortnightly basis so will also be unlikely to meet demand. As the service in the area is also currently provided by the Voluntary Sector, but funded on a contract basis by the authourity it is much more likely that the Voluntary Sectors ability to provide good quality Day Care services will collapse.

A reason for the bar being set low for access to Day Care was that, as our senior managers were fond of saying, was what was termed a 'preventative service'. It was seen as a form of early-intervention which would prevent someone needing more services at a later stage. This was clearly logical whether it was giving a carer a break, extending a persons support network, improving someones mood, or just being able to tell when something is wrong Day Care did work in this respect.

Our Head of Service used to bemoan how we had so little to invest in such preventative services and how this undoubtedly increased the costs we had to pay now and in the future. A cycle occoured where less money on prevention meant higher costs and even less for prevention.

Reducing Day Care provision seems to be a leap along this cycle, but even more troubling later in the document is the following passage detailing a planned budget saving of £776 000 across the council. The passage reads:

All voluntary sector contracts which are identified as providing non
statutory preventative services are included and will be ended. The
loss of these services will impact on later costs where early
intervention would have reduced service need. Such cuts may
result in some organisations becoming unviable which will impact
on their use by other areas of the Council and partner
organisations.

Which all leaves me wondering what happens in the future?

The end of day care?

2011-01-17T09:57:00.000-08:00

The local rag in my area today carried a story about how the day centres in the district are under threat due to budget cuts. It's made the front page, but to anyone anywhere near the world of social care it's not news at all.

Day care has long been considered to be the weakest gazelle among local authourities portfolio of services. Caught in a pincer movement between cost-conscious authourities who regard day care as an unecessary luxury on one hand and by modernisers who see it as hopelessley out of date the real surprise is how long it's managed to survive.

It could well be that attacking services out in the open is difficult at the best of times as the local rags dedication of their front page testifies, but I distinctly remember talk years ago of a more subtle approach using individual budgets as a way of phasing out day care. The arguement was that people would prefer to buy a football season ticket or do something, anything, other than a jigsaw with missing pieces and a sing-a-long in a church hall. The logic dictated that in the face of greater choice day centres just wouldn't cut it.

Another important argument is that day care is just not inclusive. Social care has a progressive element to it and day care has just got too much of a segregationalist whiff about it. Why should a person not enjoy the kind of leisure activities the rest of us enjoy, football, nights out with friends, watching a gig, just because they have a disability, and hasn't the DDA made all these things more accesable anyway?

There are however, problems with this view. The first being that a lot of people actually like day care. Most centres had a waiting list for spaces and a fair number of people once they had started enjoyed it so much they then asked for a second or third day. This was perfectly understandable as for a lot of people, particularly older people, day centre represented a vital link to the world outside their living rooms. As care managers our day centres also proved invaluable. Their staff could build good relationships with service users meaning they could detect a change in someone which might indicate something was wrong.

Second there is the issue of costs. A football season ticket can cost a lot. Day care on the other hand is cheap. In my area we had a block contract with a voluntary organisation. Most of the premises were also purpose built common rooms at council owned warden assisted accomodation so overheads were low. There may well be better alternatives, but there aren't cheaper ones.

It almost seems like another age, but around four years ago we even offered the service for free and had given days away without any kind of real assessment. Those days are long gone and unlikely to ever return, but I wonder will it be the same for day care?

People matter

2011-01-10T14:37:00.000-08:00

I continue to live a double life. Half my time is spent studying social policy, the other half in the call-centre.

I tend to view the call centre as a necessary evil; a mind numbing experience I put myself through to pay the bills. Its certainly not often the call centre teaches me much about social policy, but recently it has.

What I have learnt in the call centre is that whilst there is a lot of rhetoric about the importance of the customer and customer service it is the bottom line which matters above all else. The firms I provide customer service for have no interest in the customer beyond how to squeeze more money out of them.

This was brought home to me when I had to deal with a customer who was quite rightly unhappy with some aspects of the service they received from the company. They told me they would no longer be doing business with the company unless it changed the way it went about certain things. They had simply had enough and would vote with their feet.

I reflected that this would make no difference at all to the company. So long as the majority of customers continued to put up with things and enough new customers replaced the ones walking away it really didn't matter to the firm.

I contrasted this with my time at the council. If someone was unhappy with an aspect of the service their issue would at least be examined and a response provided, but in any case we just weren't happy with failiure, our business was to serve people so people counted.

All this has implications for social care. We are undoubtably edging towards a system with a bigger space for large scale private-providers. We need to protect the notion that above all else people matter.

I told you so

2010-12-31T03:59:00.000-08:00

Well, it's been an interesting year in politics and social policy. There would have been few prizes on offer for the prediction that Cameron would be PM, but as head of a Con-Dem coalition??

Before writing this I re-visited the predictions I offered last year to see if I could produce a scorecard. Unfortunately I seem to have been far too vauge and long-term - more personalisation was one of my conclusions this time a year ago. Well, yes probably and being a long-term trend it will probably continue. So I award myself null points for that one.

I'm hoping to do better with my 2011 predictions, or rather one prediction. In a sense I'm cheating because it has already happened. The stories are finally beginning to appear linking cuts with their less than desierable outcomes.

So far we have had the ideological sell. Cuts need to have been made we have been told and we seem for the most part to have bought it. For the Government this was the easy part as time is needed reveal the consequences of these decisions. This is now beginning with the Guardian reporting that a £609 000 saving from scrapping a flu awareness campaign has now been reversed as it has been decided in the midst of a flu ourtbreak that it was probably not the best idea.

Another piece in the paper carries a warning from a campaigner, Lucy Cope of Mothers Against Guns, that public spending cuts may result in an "era of terror". Rather a chilling prediction, but one which firmly holds the Government to account. Like the Health Secretary is finding out to his cost now; if individual ministerial decisions to cut funding can be linked to a negative event or set of outcomes the result is highly politically damaging.

The government is sure to be seeing many more 'I told you so' moments in 2011

Ragged trousers

2010-12-27T16:33:00.000-08:00

Back in my council employee days days we received a monthly e-mailed newsletter. A cynic like me generally regarded this as mere propaganda, back-slapping by senior managers on hitting a target which meant nothing to anyone remotely near the frontline, but one feature I loved was where another member of staff would pick their top ten books. Most interesting was the senior managers picks. The Executive Director tellingly plumping for Machiavelli's The Prince among his ten, recommending it as an excellent manual for any manager.

The Prince did not appear on anyone elses list, but one title seemed to be almost de riguer: The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.

Spotting it for £3 in a branch of HMV it has lain on my bookshelf for several months just waiting patientley for the right mood to take me. That mood would come folowing this particularly vacuous read (even by the standard of football books) by Colin Murray which left me gasping for something a bit more heavyweight.

My initial reluctance to read the book was inspired in part by the fact that I felt that it would, at over 100 years old, have little relevance to today.

How wrong could I be. The book shows how little has changed in 100 years. I am only a third of the way through and it has already dealt with how people in poverty are blamed for their own predicament rather than any blame being placed on the system. Perhaps if anything the book is more relavant today than ever as it shows how (despite the protestations of current and previous governments) work alone is not necessarily a route out of poverty. It also shows how the system leads to a grossly uneven distribution of wealth, again a lesson becoming more and more relavant as workers earn minimum wages whilst company directors protect their already huge profits by tax avoidance.

The book also reminds us us why we need a welfare state. Its all very well to knock it and to say that 'hand-outs' result in dependency and reduce the incentive to work, but do we really want the alternative?

Christmas shopping

2010-12-19T15:29:00.000-08:00

Whilst we are all busy with our Christmas shopping; please spare a thought for the workers who produce the goods we are buying.

I will not write much on the subject; it is all explained much better in this article

Grim statistics

2010-12-11T03:19:00.000-08:00

It's been impossible to get away from the news content generated from the fees demonstration. It left me wondering today why as my younger self would have headed to central London, or at least marched round campus, my older self is happy just to watch it all on TV. I tell myself that it's because I haven't the time, work, family and university meaning free time is now a rare luxury.

Besides, the forces I am currently doing battle with are statistics; more specifically assignment number two and all its logistic regression analysis.

Statistics has never been my strong point and having just finished a book about the Tour de France I can't help but draw comparisons between myself and the riders as they approach the Pyranees.

It feels as if my degree is the race. I've had some good results on the flat stages of Northern France, but as I look at Mt Logistical Regression towering above me I know I'll be spending the next few stages in the autobus; the group of riders at the back straining just to stay inside the race cut off time whilst dreaming of the finish on the Champs-Elysees

Fees

2010-12-09T03:53:00.000-08:00

There's something I'm deeply ashamed of.... for as long as I can remember I've voted Lib Dem. Still, I can be confident that I will never again repeat this mistake.

Sentiments which I'm sure would be shared among the small throng of protesters gathering on campus as I walked home from my early morning lecture today.

As I passed by I recalled a conversation I had with some of my colleagues at the call-centre yesterday. We'd all felt short changed, even depressed, by the fact that our first degrees had led several years on to a low-wage call centre job. We're not isolated cases either. Research has suggested as much as one-third of the call-centre workforce are graduates

The answer we all concluded is either returning to university to do a more vocational degree giving entry to a profession, or like me to go down the postgraduate route, but higher fees closes this door as older students and post-graduates also have debt, family committments and opportunity costs from giving up what employment they do have.

Students are being asked to pay ever more for their education, yet at the same time the rewards for that education are becoming more uncertain and dare I say unevenly distributed...

Grit

2010-12-04T00:50:00.000-08:00

From the look of all the pictures on facebook (the most original being a re-creation of the ice world Hoth in a back garden) I'm guessing there has been a bit of snow in the past few days. I also beleive this to be the case as I heard a couple of snow related features on radio two yesterday.

One feature consisted of a lady attempting to name and shame her local authourity. The issue was a request for a grit bin. The lady in question seemed rather well to do and in line with the stereotype had it seemed harried her local councillor into making an over-rash promise that yes a grit-bin will be provided. Unfortunately when the lady called to "remind" said councillor of their promise two weeks ago she was told that no, due to the cutbacks, there was now no money for a grit bin.

The lady talked about how last year she lost two weeks holiday as she couldn't get out of her home for the snow and ice. The presenter then put it to her, why don't the residents club together and purchase a grit bin - cost £1000? Oh no, she said, we pay enough council tax, at a high rate, and see very little in return anyway. It was she argued clearly the councils responsibility.

It struck me as interesting logic. For well to do residents (unless we're talking the squeezed middle here) a £1000 grit bin between them, lets say there are 10, thats £100 each; probably not a huge stretch. A price worth paying for less disruption?

What really gets me though is that government is now asking more of preople in general; students are asked to 'make a contribution' to their education (in fact now a fairly sizeable contribution) and by the same philosophy the disabled are also asked to 'make a contribution' to their care.... in the future it seems more and more people will be asked to 'make a contribution.'

This is because the idea of a big state where we all pull together, where we pool risk and share responsibility, is in retreat to the neo-liberal vision of the small state; a state which asks us to 'make a contribution'.

Therin lies the contradiction in the ladies argument, on one hand she is critical of the level of taxation she in particular is on the receiving end of; no doubt she is at least receptive to the neo-liberal vision of a small state with low levels of personal taxation

Yet when it is suggested she personally 'makes a contribution' she suddenly seems to find the idea repugnant.

I wonder where she stands on tuition fees?

Forbidden cities.

2010-11-28T13:46:00.001-08:00

I've been at the Guardian website again. In between all this wikileaks excitement (Personally looking forward to hearing the diplomats candid views of Cameron) I've spotted an article on how the cap on Housing Benefit has been pushed back to January 2012 to allow local authourities time to deal with the ensuing displacement.

I'm genuinely terrified by the consequences of this policy. According to the article the number of households affected in inner London will be 18 645. Given that the average UK household size in 2008 is 2.37 just taking that figure means at least 44 189 individuals will be affected, however, the real figure is probaly more, as the households affected are more likely to be families rather than single people or couples without children so the average size of affected households will be greater than the overall uk average.

I am unfortunate to live in a city where rents are high. The reasons for the high prices are many, too many to be listed here, but there is a general rule of thumb that proximity to transport links and proximity to the areas where jobs are concentrated mean higher rents. Lower rents are found in areas far from jobs where public transport is poor and even if it does exist prohibitively expensive.

It seems strange to me that if you lose your job you will possibly end up moving to an area far from potential sources of work. It certainly seems counter to the IDS led reforms to unemployment benefits which are all about getting people back into work. I have a scary vision of the marginalized, being literally marginalized, dispatched to the edge of cities where a punative benefits regime forces them to undertake long journeys each morning and evening to minimum wage service sector jobs in the centre of the cities where they are not allowed to live. Forbidden cities.

Personalisation...again!

2010-11-27T04:11:00.000-08:00

I've said a lot about personalisation in the past; on here, on the Guardian, on other blogs, in team meetings, on training courses, in seminars, so many places, so many times, I've lost count. I've even consciously tried to remain quiet on the issue for a bit for fear of just going on about it far, far, too much.

Today however, I caught this article by a person with a personal budget which quite neatly captures my feelings and concerns about personalisation.

That is: Personalisation is a good thing which can improve services, but there are many issues around it which still need to be addressed. The simple fact which is spelt out in the article is that quality care costs.

The issue is are local authorities prepared, or able to fund it and if they are not does it mean that people unable to top-up with their own cash are pushed into using their budgets to purchase care from one of the typical big care agencies personalisation was meant to spell the end for?

The privatisation of the public.

2010-11-19T01:00:00.000-08:00

I've been arguing for some time that there is now no such thing as the public and private sector; that the divide between the two has become so smudged they can no longer be seen as distinct entities.

Finally some proof of this in the Guardian. In the first 5 months since the election Capita received 3.3 billion, which as the article points out is greater than the annual budget for the Department of Energy and Climate Change.

What's more shocking is that the figures seem to refer only to Central Government spending. If we looked at local government the scale to which firms like Capita perform the functions hitherto carried out by local authorities we'd no doubt conclude that somehow, behind our backs, the whole state apparatus has been privatised.

an amendment

2010-11-14T08:10:00.000-08:00

Just something I want to add on to my previous post.

Last night, whilst settling down to my first assignment of the year, I caught the end of a debate on Radio 4. I can't recall who any of the participants were apart from Michael Portillo, but one of the points which was made in the programme has resonated with me.

The point concerned the type of language used in the debate around the reforms to benefits, in particular unemployment benefit, and how it is playing a role in allocating the blame for their predicament onto individuals; a point I was at pains to make myself on this blog a little while back.

It all seems curious to me that in the middle of a downturn widely held to be caused by the actions of the finance sector, and affecting many economies across the world (particularly hard hit is our neighbour Ireland) that the blame for unemployment has been shifted from the whimsical vagaries of the international economic order onto the individual.

Is it me or is this counter-intuitive?

Active Labour Markets

2010-11-12T01:17:00.000-08:00

Active Labour Markets; This is the technical term for the reforms proposed to unemployment benefit. Philosophically they adhere to the amendment to the ideas of social rights which formed the foundations of the post war Beveridge welfare state; From simple social rights to what Blair best termed 'rights with responsibilities.'

In historical terms the seeds of change emanated from the 'crisis' in the welfare state which arose from collapse of the full-employment economy in the 1970s. The social-insurance model Beveridge created was only intended as a short-term stop gap never a long-term solution so was ill-equipped to cope with the new phenomena of long term unemployment.

Some 40 years on and the problem of long-term employment has never really been solved. My old Exec director was often fond of saying that in our City there were now families where three generations had not worked.

Are active labour market policies the answer? As Polly Toynbee points out about 1.5 million people are expected to lose their job in the next 2 years. She also hits on another key point; that is what will happen to those most on the margins, will the most vulnerable be the most heavily penalised?

It is here that the devil really is in the detail. Per se, most people - even a room of left-leaning Social Policy students, will agree on the face of it with active labour market policies - so long as the carrot is as big as the stick. That is so long as the policy places emphasis on incentives and support to those most in need.

This DWP report, based on viewing other countries policies, published last year highlights some of the key conditions which need to be met:

1. Personalised support and early intervention for 'those most in need'

2. Adaquate staff/client ratios

3.Specific support for 'harder to help customers'

4. Subsidized work placements and on the job training.

It remains to be seen whether these conditions are met. If they are not all that remains will be an excessively punative system cutting benefits for the vulnerable and shunting others into low-pay, no-prospect Mcjobs

Rage, rage

2010-11-10T12:35:00.000-08:00

I must say that today's events in London caught me quite by surprise. As I was explaining to a course-mate today my first year of university happened to coincide with the introduction of fees. There were of course protests then as well, but the overall response from students was somewhat muted and apathetic.

This seemed to add to the general characterisation that unlike their long-haired and bearded forebears (who had become the politicians then introducing fees) subsequent generations of students, and young people in general, were content to shirk politics concentrating instead on the trappings of consumerism. Campuses far from resounding with talk of radical philosophers had become apolitical stomping grounds for brands like Red Bull and financial firms jostling for the opportunity to woo the Hollister clad students (See this Guardian article for a view on how University life differs from the 1970s).

I don't think there has been a drastic or radical re-awakening of the general student political consciousness far from it, apart from a few hardy individuals painting banners outside the students union it has been business as usual on my campus with the Red Bull beach buggy blasting its sounds into the chilly air.

Putting aside the scenes of broken windows which do more harm than good for any cause; For me the significance of today is that we've seen the truth in the theories which argue that any retrenchment of the welfare state will be heavily contested that people will indeed take to the streets. It certainly seems the welfare state will not be going gently into that good night

Dreams

2010-11-05T05:25:00.000-07:00

We are currently in a phoney-war. Waiting for the cuts to make the transformation from paper projections to concrete reality it appears that aside from a few opening skirmishes the real action is still somewhere further down the line.

Yet have we already seen the birth of one of the most important debates, one which may well come to define the new century.

Much has been made of the term the 'squeezed middle' which exploded into our consciousness following Ed Milibands election as labour leader.

On one hand this can be dismissed as simply the politics of Blair; Championing the middle ground occupied by the floating voter, but on the other it can be an astute reflection on the final collapse of the Post War Welfare State. Like Brighton's West Pier the Post War Welfare state seems to have lingered on an, a shell of its former self, gradually disintegrating back into the sea with each new storm.

It has long been said that the welfare state, founded on principles of universalism, benefited the middle classes, sometimes even disproportionately. They gained from an expansion in university education, the universal NHS and perhaps most importantly benefited from the jobs created by expanding state bureaucracies the legions of teachers, nurses, town-planners and social workers all needed to deliver the new universal services.

The impact of the disintegration of the post-war welfare state therefore means that, as Madeline Bunting pointed out in the Guardian, the middle-class dream of university education, home ownership and the trappings of status are in effect now over.

There are of course many interestiong arguments about just who the middle class are. Melanie Phillips favours the term 'aspirational classes'. Aspiration is of course another word for dream; the dreaming classes. Whilst I do not wholly accept Phillips views about the finer points of the definition the dreams of the middle-classes, of a comfortable life, of a good society, of upward-mobility and fairness provide the template for the post-war welfare state and are intrinsically, inseparably linked.

The question this leaves is what replaces the dream? For its many faults the attempt to create a 'New Jerusalem' after the war was an act of dreaming par excellence. A dream of a better society which would somehow make sense of the sacrifices made to create the platform of peace and prosperity it rested upon.

The 'big society' just doesn't seem an appropriate replacement for the good society; something the Philosopher Slavoj Zizek (credit for the link goes to The Plashing Vole) hits upon when he argues, using some intellectual groundwork by Oscar Wilde, that charitable giving only alleviates and prolongs the misery caused by the overarching system; Charity per se is not necessarily bad he suggests, but what is needed is to attack the causes of the problems - to create a better society. To dream of a better world.

This is our challenge all the more urgent now the dreams of 1945 and the middle classes are over. Once the phoney-war has ended and the cuts begin to bite we need to ask ourselves what kind of society we want.

Just what are we dreaming of?

Private sector job losses?

2010-11-02T12:21:00.000-07:00

Some really interesting news in the Guardian today about the impact of spending cuts on the private sector.

I have long argued that the distinction between the public, private and even third sector has become increasingly blurred in the past two decades.

This is now so much so that the distinctions no longer really hold up; they are also ever more opaque. In my area it's certainly fairly safe to say that most people don't know where Capita ends and the council begins and we're not even talking about the private sector companies involved with highways, street lighting, running leisure centres, the voluntary sector running several academies and the presence of privately run NHS treatment centres.

This seems to be recognised, at least in part, by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) who assert that:

"The combined direct and inderect effect of public sector cuts will result in the loss of 650 000 private sector jobs."

I'm currently taking a fairly intense unit on survey methods at uni so I'm increasingly wary of any survey unless I'm familiar with its methodology, but this seems to be hinting in the right direction. It will definitely be interesting to see whether any more surveys reach similar conclusions.

Care Credits

2010-10-30T01:34:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning to the news that the Government is considering a system of 'Care Credits' which has apparently operated in Japan since 1991.

Just to summarize the idea is that volunteers providing care build up 'credits' which they themselves can use. In Japan this can be either themselves or a relative and the credits seem to be weighted towards tasks such as personal care as opposed to shopping and towards unsocial hours.

Even stranger on BBC breakfast none other than Professor Heinz Wolff (last seen in this Nintendo DS puzzle game). Presumably Heinz Wolff was there to lend some intellectual gravitas to what is a scheme worthy of a mad professor.

I don't know where to begin with picking apart this policy. It could be that Japan is a very different society to our own so the success of a policy there is little guarantee of success elsewhere. It could also be that the system will favour certain social groups above others; particularly those rich in both free time and cultural capital.

I would rather though focus on the role of professional carers. Whilst the voluntary sector in my area did take over the nicer aspects of care; shopping, hoovering, dog walking and luncheon clubs where (generally) elderly ladies would gather for a nice chat over a cup of tea, the professional sector did the hard jobs; the personal care which could be anything from changing incontinence pads to bathing or applying cream, helping to manage medication, as well as dealing with difficult clients and when I say difficult I do mean difficult.

The job of a professional carer requires a high degree of skill and dedication. This is matched by a high level of responsibility and accountability. Sadly the pay and social status (of both paid and unpaid carers) lag far behind. This has led us to believe that the carers job is something which could be done by anybody.

It isn't.

lean and efficient?

2010-10-27T15:03:00.000-07:00

A piece in the New Statesman recently caught my eye (yes I do read publications other than the Guardian!)

An interesting aspect of the piece is its questioning of the universities actions in seeking to appoint someone to what tends to be referred to as a 'non-job' i.e a role in a public organisation which serves little real purpose. All the more perplexing, the article suggests, is that this appointment is taking place amidst a back-drop of a major funding review. Fiddling as Rome burns.

It makes me wonder just how valid the arguments are that cutting funding, or the threat of, increases efficiency out of pure necessity. Is the reality somewhat more complex than this? It certainly seems a caricature that well funded organisations are bloated and inefficient; like a 18th century baron with a bad case of gout whereas less well funded organisations are by extention lean and effective.

Could the case simply be bad management and a failing organisational structure which fails to recognise its priorities? If so will funding cuts not make this situation worse??

the long-term view

2010-10-11T12:48:00.000-07:00

Way back in 1997 tuition fees were introduced at the level of £1000 per course per year. Just over a decade later and fees are over £3000 per year. Tomorrow we may even see the cap lifted completely allowing top universities to charge five figure sums for courses.

Sometimes we need to take a long-term view of developments. Very rarely will the true extent of a change in policy be apparent at first; this especially goes in areas which are politically sensitive. Take the ending universality of child benefit. The argument is that top rate taxpayers can do without it. Of course they probably can, but the loss of the universality principle introduces the potential for the eligibility criteria to be progressively tightened leading to groups lower on the income scale losing out.

Dr Beeching returns

2010-10-07T10:48:00.000-07:00

One of my great loves is cycling. I love the relaxation which comes from just being on my bike out in the back of beyond. Many of my routes make use of the railway lines which have been disused since the axe of Dr Beeching fell upon them. With their gentle gradients they make for great cycling, but one part of me always feels a hint of sadness. As a cyclist I'm all for sustainable transport and I can never get away from the feeling that the Beeching axe in its reactionary short-sightedness robbed us all of a future which would have been a bit better than today.

As I hear more and more political rhetoric piling up about cuts, the savings which need to be made, the fact that it can't go on like this, there is no alternative... this is the future. Part of me can't help thinking of Dr Beeching. Is this the fate which awaits the welfare state?

A rising tide

2010-09-30T09:31:00.000-07:00

I've made much recently of the somewhat abstract phrase 'public service ethos', but feel have failed to really capture why it is so important, how it works and why losing it will be a disaster.

Just now I have been reminded of a set of circumstances which illustrate the point I am trying to make. I was once told that whilst my Local Authorities in-house care agency would assist other agencies in the private and third sectors with improving standards by spreading best-practice the agencies in the private sector would not reciprocate as they did not wish to give their competitors any advantage.

In other words whilst the public sector took a co-operative approach, seeking a rising tide which would raise all boats the private sector with its ethos of competition has little interest in the bigger picture.

This is why we cannot let go of the ideals of public service.

A vision of the future

2010-09-29T11:51:00.000-07:00

On the topic of the perils of contracting-out another story about the care market. 40 homes of agencies shut down after involvement with CQC this year.

The strange thing about social-care is that for what is the Cinderella end of the welfare state (Most of my fellow social policy students interest being focused on 'sexier' topics like the NHS) it has been at the forefront of contracting-out ever since the NHS and Comm. Care act 1990 instituted the purchaser/ provider split. Helped by comparatively low-barriers to entry compared to other sectors the market in contracting-out has boomed in Social Care along with the associated problems.

A vision of the new kind of welfare state?

On contracting-out

2010-09-26T12:56:00.000-07:00

I am getting older. Despite a perspectives on ageing course I attended a few years ago trying to teach me that age is just a social construct there appears little doubt that I now use my personal stereo for listening to Radio 4 just as much as I do for music.

This Saturday I took the opportunity offered by possibly the last sunny weekend day of the year to get out into the country on my bicycle. As I wound my way down a hillside I was listening to a political show on the station which featured Lib Dem Chris Huhne.

One of the topics was of course the whole business of the 'virtual-council'. Huhne was firmly in the against corner. The point he made was that if a council needs to make changes to improve standards then it can take whatever action it feels is necessary. In a contracting-out system the council cannot act straightforwardly as actions can only be through the framework of the contract.

It seems contracting-out is like giving up owner-occupation for renting. Overall control of the property is lost; if I want to paint my room anything other than magnolia I cannot simply grab a brush and paint-pot I must negotiate with the owner of the property first as per the contract and there is no guarantee they will agree. Then there's issues like long-term planning. Is it worth a renter on a 6 month contract planting an apple tree in the garden or constructing a conservatory knowing they may themselves may not receive future benefit from these? Then there is the issue of increasing housing prices. The owner-occupier and landlord both benefit from increased asset value, the renter loses through higher costs.

There are of course benefits to renting. The Landlord bears responsibility for repairs and building insurance. They must also absorb costs from raises in mortgage interest rates which occur during the lifetime of the contract (though this is only in the short-term as these will be passed on when the contract is up for renewal).

Perhaps unsurprising that not many people who are in the position of owner-occupation would elect to switch to renting.

Virtual-councils: A threat to democracy?

2010-09-23T04:13:00.000-07:00

I've seen this one coming for long-time. Ever since my former employers shifted several departments over to Capita with talk of the option of more in the future I had an inkling that councils of the future would consist of just a nucleus of key professionals and managers in an overseeing and strategic role. Front-line work would be carried out on a by staff working for a private sector contractor. Now what is being dubbed the 'virtual council'seems several steps closer to reality.

There are arguments, mainly economic, for this move. Cost-control becomes the responsibility of the contractor and council managers become free of the tiresome jobs of setting up and maintaining the systems and structures which will support their aims; instead they simply issue a diktat and leave the messy practical implementation side to someone else. At this point of course we come up against a economic argument against outsourcing; In a relationship governed by contracts any changes will need to be written into the contract, a costly business.

I don't intend to dwell on the economic however, what concerns me more is the philosophical. In particular the ethos of public service and of democracy.
Many people I worked with were driven by a desire to serve their community often the result of deeply held beliefs both religious and secular in origin. It is why they chose a career in social care rather than a potentially more financially rewarding option. Would this ethos survive in the culture of a private company and would the field be worse off for its disappearance?

Secondly there is the democracy argument. At no point in its history have the links between the public, council officers, and the elected representatives been more opaque and more tenuous. I read some time ago a piece about the proliferation of call centres in local government. Rather than improving contact between the public and those who serve them the article argued that contact centres actually made things worse by preventing the public from directly accessing officers. All this is bad for democracy and its bedfellows of transparency and accountability. Will a fragmented network of contractors make this already worsening situation worse? Will we know who to hold to account when things go wrong or when things happen which we don't agree with; or will our elected representatives shield themselves behind the likes of Capita?

Mate-crime

2010-09-14T11:37:00.000-07:00

There is one thing which has been troubling me above almost every other thing. I have noticed over the past couple of years there have been reported several of cases in the media where a vulnerable adult has been subjected to a shocking degree of abuse and even in some cases killed by people whom they regard as friends.

Despite their horrific nature the cases there is little outrage about who should or shouldn't resign, who should be fired or struck-off, and which systems should be changed so this never happens again. The media report these cases as they would any other crime story, as something of course shocking, but ultimately an isolated act; not a wider problem which calls for many difficult questions to be asked.

I have therefore been gladdened to see the Guardian showing signs of picking up on this issue, even using the term 'mate-crime'to describe what has been happening. I would recommend everyone read it. It raises a number of questions which we all need to ask.

The Cautionary Tale of Connaught

2010-09-07T12:59:00.000-07:00

There's two types of blog posts. There are the ones with a long gestation, a loose idea that time turns over in your head as it is whittled down to finely detailed perfection ready to present to cyberspace. These, for me at least, are rare. They are the type of blog posts I mean to write. Type two, the far more common type, are the type where a news story catches my eye during the day, not any news story, but one which inspires emotion within, maybe anger, maybe sadness, relief or even laughter. It instantly creates the urge to comment to just put something down on the page.

Today the story is about Connaught. Interestingly it crosses over with a post I've been meaning to write for months now, a post about the pros and cons of contracting out in the public sector.

My politics and past experience (school dinners in the early 90s) has led me to take a position of public-sector-good private- sector-bad. For me it was definitely a case of Crapita not Capita and my heart would sink a little everytime I saw the moniker 'working with' on a sweater, leaflet or side of a van. Even free entry to my local swimming baths last week didn't allay my narrow eyed cynicism that standards would plunge now the profit motive was introduced like a shark in the pool.

This is the crux of the issue. Our villain is the profit motive. Victorious in driving back the ethos of public service it eschews a logic of doing things only so far as they are profitable. This is why residential care is in such a mess. Standards cannot rise above the level at which profit ceases to be made.

Is this tough a too simplistic reading? Possibly it is true in some cases but, I find myself feeling increasingly sorry for private sector partners seeing them as victims. This is because in some areas the state drives a very hard bargain. Take residential care again, is the problem the private sector ownership of homes or is the problem of poor standards due to the local authorities who raise their funding for placements at below inflationary rates?

The attractiveness of a contract for a government department, or local authority is the ability to pass the buck. The contractor must decide what to cut when funding is squeezed and must also deal with the blame of any consequences from their cost-cutting. Connaughts demise also shows the risk prospective partners undergo. Government is a big player and now has a whole support industry which depends on it. Firms like Capita just did not exist a little over a decade ago but now generate large profits from public service contracting. Markets though shift and power with it, will government begin to assert its power in a not dissimilar was to a supermarket chain over a small producer, or will contractors find new strategies to fight back.

All quiet in the blogosphere

2010-08-29T16:10:00.000-07:00

It must be because it's August. Even the blogosphere has a hush about it as people are en vacances. No such luck for me. I can't even afford a UK break, let alone join the hordes (virtually every single person I know)who are jetting off to Turkey the new destination of choice for its ability to provide guaranteed warm weather outside of the eurozone. This has found me, perhaps rather sadly, commenting on the Guardian a lot, particularly on my second fave subject the big society.

One interesting debate has been around the issue of recruiting volunteers and how this is far more problematic than first assumed. Volunteers are unsurprisingly more likely to be middle-class types leading to some big geographical inequalities.

This led me to chip in with the suggestion that due to the changes in voluntary organisations in the past decade, particularly the changes leading to vol. sector organisations playing a bigger role in providing services hitherto provided by the state, there is less room for volunteers, particularly unskilled volunteers so this leaves the young and other groups at a big disadvantage as even if they want to volunteer there are actually very few openings.

The voluntary sector is just not what it was, no longer is it a bunch of do-gooding-amateurs mucking-in, but is now more likely to consist of highly skilled and more often than not paid professionals. One voluntary group I worked with employed ex-nursing staff to run the core part of the operation whilst tea was made by Social Work students on placement.

Openings which do exist are generally confined to the fund-raising side, though the top level work is again now in the hands of remunerated professionals and the ground work is carried out by contractors such as the infamous Chuggers. Charity shops and opening bags are therefore the only real things on offer.

The problem with local government

2010-08-21T13:28:00.001-07:00

Last weekend saw me have a very enjoyable meet up with some of my former colleagues. It was great to catch up with some people after almost a year. As I finished off my first pint I also managed to come up with a theory about just what is wrong with local government....

So many people are just unhappy in their jobs. This may not be a particularly unusual statement. Very few people I've met either in the public sector or private sector profess to love their jobs, but there is a much deeper sense of low morale and of feeling trapped in local government - I should know I spent a couple of years there myself.

The reason for this is simply the increment system. If you get appointed to a role at say 15k per year you will receive a £500 per year pay-rise automatically for the first few years, then for another few years you need to prove you have achieved set objectives before getting your raise. This continues until you reach the upper limit for that grade at which point you can continue no more, at 15k this would typically be about 19-20k.

The advantage of the system is that it rewards experience and loyalty. The disadvantage is that it can become for many a gilded cage as it makes a sideways move to another team, authority or even a move out of the organisation particularly expensive. I once worked with a very experienced care manager who confessed she would love to work in a mental health team but, after many years in her current post was at the top of her grade so such a sideways move would mean a fairly drastic pay-cut.

This all leads to a time-serving mentality with the attendant stagnation and resentment from unfulfilled dreams. People have a disincentive to move and develop so remain in post long after their enthusiasm for the job has faded. Their incumbency also prevents a new person with fresh enthusiasm taking up that post.

Experience of course is a good thing, especially in a field like social care where an experienced member of staff is invaluable, but it's a question of balance in a team. Too many time-servers and the team suffers.

A question of accountability

2010-08-13T01:14:00.000-07:00

There is no doubt that there is just a pinch of politics behind the decision to publish details of what are being referred to as the spending 'excesses' of the Department for Communities and Local Government under the previous administration. There is also little doubt that groups such as the Taxpayers Alliance will be foaming at the mouth as they pick over the details whilst the media will be searching for what can be described as a 'duck island moment' - one item which sits above all overs for sheer folly.

For once I'm with all of them. In my time in local government I knew nothing, but grim austerity. Office downgrades, no awaydays for several years, no Christmas party, no nothing, well something, in 5 years the total sum we received was a £5 lunch paid for from money the a team member had received for taking a student on. I disagree with this approach too. Awaydays can be valuable for morale and for working out operational issues, even a Christmas party improves cohesion and morale. The problem is that when budgets are scrutinised you need to show added value and whilst it is easy and straightforward to say what something cost it is much harder to and infinitely more complex prove just what value it adds.

That said excess is excess. I remember hearing stories from my friends girlfriend who worked for UK Trade and Industry about all expenses paid trips, including a coach to Brighton for their Christmas do and inviting staff from SEEDA along for the ride. The team also underspent it's budget one year so a member of staff was duly dispatched to purchase a load of blackberry's so as to protect next years allocation. There couldn't have been anymore of a contrast with my own experience where we frequently struggled biros so poor quality they dried up after a few days if they were the black ink type or became unbelievably blobby if they were blue.

The reason for the difference was simple. In the local authority we were more accountable - to a local electorate who paid a locally set tax rate and so faced closer scrutiny not just from them, but from politicians eager to rein in costs wherever they could. For a central government department and even more so for the quangos which have proliferated the workings are more opaque and there is no clear link to the individual taxpayer.

I don't believe the issue is one of who the political masters are, after all quangos were a Tory invention, but one of governance. Whilst a commitment to publish expense details will improve transparency and therefore accountability it still does not address some major issues, particularly with quangos as to who runs them, what are they for, who sets their priorities, questions in general which need to be asked.

Ironically transparency overall has been declining. Commercial confidentiality can be invoked to cover a multitude of sins and many people do not know if the council officer they are dealing with is employed by the local authority or a commercial contractor. David Cameron's call for a greater Civil-Society also raises issues, charities after all are far less transparent than local government - although numerous efforts have been carried out to improve reporting and accountability, but with the charge that this was eroding what was distinctive about the sector.

As ever the answers are less than transparent.

The Pinch

2010-08-12T02:24:00.000-07:00

Last night I finished reading 'The Pinch: How the baby boomers stole their childrens future and how they can give it back' by the current Universities Minister David Willetts.

The main focus of the book is demographic; chiefly the demographic disruption caused by the baby-boomer generation. An ecxcellent review on the Guardian website captures the key points covered by the book. One of the most intriguing arguements the book puts forward is on the question of social mobility. For Willetts declining social mobility and rising inequality is explained by the discrepancy between individual behaviour and group behaviour. Whilst as individuals the baby-boomers do all that they can to assist their own children (via the bank of mum and dad), as a group they are responsible for monopolising resources and creating the conditions which leave subsequent generations with a rather poorer deal than the one they themselves took advantage of.

As one of the generation who has been hard done by ever since Maggie took my milk away followed by being the first year to have to pay university tuition fees and for whom home ownership is as realistic a dream as owning my own private island much of the book chimed. As a student of Social Policy I was also impressed. However, not all points were backed up with sufficient evidence; Willetts only alludes to the reasons why the baby-boomers have been able to get a good deal from the state via the ballot box not pausing to look at the kind of theories, such as median voter theory, which could explain this.

Overall it is a great text on the consequences of demographics upon the functioning of ther welfare state and poses many questions which will become ever more topical as the first baby-boomers begin drawing their pensions.

Health and Social Care; a happy marriage?

2010-08-02T00:42:00.000-07:00

For the past few years the biggest buzz phrase among senior managers was 'joint working.' Unlike such derided management-speak phrases as 'blue sky thinking' Joint working meant something real, a long overdue acceptance that social care and health are inexorably tied together. The real initiatives which emerged from this were the rehab teams; jointly staffed by community nurses, Physiotherapists, occupational therapists, care managers and social workers. The teams also had access to rehab carers who were specially trained to provide assistance, but in a way which enabled the service user to maximise their independence; working toward a set of user defined goals which could range from running a marathon to making a cup of tea independently.

The teams were not without problems, one which stuck out was the cultural difference between health staff and social care staff with the former being used to far more status, professional autonomy, and possessing slightly different recording practices, but these were small and something which could be resolved over time. For me it always seemed these teams were the way forward, the sensible future for social care. Senior managers seemed to agree, the teams were innovative and with the emphasis on reducing dependence could potentially be far more cost effective.

This has led to me prophesy a marriage between health and social care. The organisational divide between the two, one PCT controlled, the other LA controlled has long seemed a bit arbitrary especially when joint-working has achieved real differences on the ground. The question was however, what organisation would give way. I long believed this to be LAs who I felt, certainly in my case, seemed to be disposing and delegating as many functions as possible in the name of cost-cutting.

But how wrong I was. It is PCTs who now see their days as numbered leaving LAs, as this Guardian article suggests, invested with the governance of health and social care.

Having not got my head round the proposed reforms to the NHS I'm unsure what this means for the future - (for my part the current system seemed to be working very, very well so I'm perplexed by the need to change it) but, the article expresses my chief concern at this stage; Can LAs handle the increased responsibility?

Social Care in the Media

2010-07-30T00:40:00.000-07:00

The first thing I did this morning was read a few pages of the excellent Pete Davies book 'All Played Out'. Sadly it is now out of print, but without wishing to write a review a large part of the book is dedicated to the machinations of the press and the role they played in creating and perpetuating the hooligan stereotype. Davis himself not disguising his contempt for the gutter press.

The second thing I did was to switch on the television. Not being one for the endless re-runs of Friends and Top Gear I decided on BBC Breakfast just as the local news segment was beginning.

There are certain things which happen with a depressing regularity, late trains, disappointment with a well hyped film (Inception) and England losing a penalty shoot out. Added to the list should be abuse in care homes; so regular it is, even in social service departments, almost expected.

The media for their part have a standardised response to any breaking story of care home abuse and the first target is always social services. The report I watched today was true to form. A brief presentation of the facts then the camera switches to a person the caption identifies as the relative of a resident. What do they comment on, their horror that their loved one may have been mistreated, their concern for them and other residents. Condemnation of the home, or even surprise.....

Not one thing of it, this may come later but, first, now it is always the same. The people the relative condemns are social services. In this case the relative is criticising social services for their indecision; telling them one day they're relative would need to move in a few days, then later revising this to immediately. The implication is that social services are dithery and incompetent

Possibly these are some valid points, maybe the department could have communicated better, but is this relevant to the story? Is it even that preventable? I can picture the scene in the office. Frantic phone calls trying to arrange emergency placements, constant calls to senior managers, the police, CQC. Assessing risk, making sure people are safe and trying to keep people informed against the backdrop of a constantly shifting situation on the ground as well as phoning their own families to tell them they won't be home until 10pm that night, getting someone to pick the kids up from school and give them dinner. I can picture this as I've scene it many time; dedicated competent people competently doing their jobs to keep people free from harm.

One case I was familiar with the local rag criticised social services and the police for being incompetent and heavy handed. Column inches were given over to family members who praised the home and the hard-working, caring staff whilst raging against social services. The tone changed when the owner and manager were convicted by a court; both receiving prison sentences.

Reform don't come cheap!

2010-07-18T12:36:00.001-07:00

Browsing my copy of the Observer today with a relaxing cup of tea I found this article.

In summary it speaks of the tensions arising from the short-term costs of reforming parts of the benefits system. Reform, unless it is simply a term applied to mask slash-and-burn policy, is a costly process.

Interestingly and worryingly the article points out that the aim of policy (to make work pay) can only be achieved without additional costs by cutting the benefits paid to the most vulnerable. Thankfully at the time being an option which will be politically difficult - unless the govt. succeeds in further demonising anyone in receipt of benefits.

I could write a whole post about the folly of a policy like Tax Credits which in effect subsidises employers who choose to profit from paying low wages. The other alternative on offer is to make employers cover costs of living, food, housing, transport etc by compelling them to pay a living wage. The chances of this coming from the Conservatives is however, very remote. No doubt they would cite job losses arising from an enhanced minimum wage, but could the reality simply be a redistribution within companies, less executive pay and fewer bonuses in favour of a living wage on the shop floor?

Now, where was I? Well, the article I think confirms many of the suspicions around IBs that the money needed in the short-term to make the scheme a success isn't going to be forthcoming. The problem then is not simply that the policy will have failed, but its potential to cause real damage to the very people for whom it purports to represent a new dawn.

In search of the Holy Grail

2010-07-08T07:49:00.000-07:00

I love the Guardian. For coverage of social policy, particularly social care it really is second to none.

I've just read another interesting article on Individual Budgets. It is over a year since I left front-line work behind yet the debate still rages and with even more intensity since the change in government and a chance in fiscal policy from prudence to pruning; or hack and slash depending on your political view-point.

The article takes the arguement far deeper into new territory. IB's should, it suggests be rolled out as a new model to replace the out-moded structures of the post-war welfare state. An interesting point, but one with which I disagree. As one commentor, anenome 6, points out we have come a long way from the kind of welfare state set up in 1945 and to suggest otherwise is a crude mis-representation.

I won't go over old ground here. My comment on the article was to once again harp on about the need to think about equality when it comes to IB's, something which always seems to be missing from the debate. In our rush to tinker with systems we need to keep sight of our core principles such as equality and fairness and make these more central to our judgements...

Anyway, perhaps the most telling part of the article comes in the final paragraph:

In future, the world might be different if Alan, Jane, Dave and others like them could get a single assessment of their needs,

Hasn't the single assessment process been a term bandied about in Social Care for a number of years? I certainly remember my department possessing glossy leaflets promoting it. One single multi-professional assessment so people didn't have to tell their stories again and again.

This was certainly the aim, but the messy reality was that some people would need to tell their story firstly to an untrained call-centre operator, then another unqualified member of staff carrying out a 'screening' assessment over the phone before a centrally based care manager would visit and assess and if not in immediate crisis a person would then be assessed again later by a locality team care manager. Single assessment it was not(and I am actually simplifying things here by leaving out Physio and Occupational Therapy assessments!)

So the single assessment process was, despite the leaflets proclaiming it a reality, as fictional as a chart of Soviet grain yeilds. Merely a half-harted quest for the unobtainable.

Stereotypes

2010-06-28T10:34:00.000-07:00

On the far edge of my desk in call-centre land sits a Vicky Pollard doll. The revolving door of the flexible labour market means that no one currently incumbent knows how or why it appeared there so there it stays rather like the dead man in Yossarian's tent in Catch 22; unchallenged except for the time it was stuffed in a drawer for the visit of dignitaries from an important client.

Generally I hardly notice it, but from time to time it catches my eye. When it does I ponder; How powerful are stereotypes like Vicki Pollard and how much do they shape the kind of welfare state we find ourselves with? Writing off the character as a crude stereotype is I believe to misjudge its power.

In my journeys through the blogsphere I have recently come across a neo-liberal blog titled: 'Burning our money'. I felt moved to comment on one post about IDS's policies as I felt a graph being used was misrepresentitive (lies, damned lies and statistics). In the process I have been able to see the other comments on the post where readers have turned to every stereotype about benefit claimants ever trotted out in the right-wing media. There's talk of "scroungers", immigrants, fraudulent incapacity claims, holidays, TVs and for a bit of comic relief among this cocktail of nastiness a link to a Daily Torygraph story.

All this in the midst of a down-turn where many people have been put out of work because of a widely reported economic downturn; yet in some quarters the unemployed are still portrayed as feckless and defective. It seems that stereotypes are very potent indeed and particularly useful to neo-liberals seeking to dismantle an already threadbare welfare state which pays such low levels of unemployment benefit it routinely sees workers losing their jobs gobbled up by debt.

Public sector workers too fare no better. Len McClusky of the Unite union making an excellent point in a recent Guardian article when he says of politicians:

"They talk about public sector workers as if they're devils. We're talking about people who teach our children, treat the sick, clean our streets, people who are responsible for building the fabric of the communities in which we live."

As a former public sector worker I was particularly aware of the gap between popular perceptions of gravy trains and reality of missed lunch-breaks, unpaid overtime and colleagues routinely burning out and as a former Social Care employee I saw many people who battled against negative stereotypes day-in-day-out.

If we want to defend our welfare state and ideals of social justice we need not be afraid to challenge stereotypes where they exist. Vicky Pollard doesn't need to be just stuffed in a drawer but confined to the dustbin.

Downloading responsibility

2010-06-21T14:12:00.000-07:00

One of my former managers at social services had a legendary habit of pacing the office after hours to check people had correctly shut down their PCs and turned off their monitors. The rationale for this was not an environmental one, but a cost driven one. As our manager reminded us we were all responsible on a individual micro-level for the councils budget. Unsurprisingly the manager in question was soon promoted. Later they returned to the office to explain why we would need to move from our modern(ish) air-conditioned, open plan, town centre office to a rabbit warren like, non air-conditioned - and boy was it hot in the summer, older building on the edge of town cut off from civilisation by both a motorway and railway; an area so remote Tesco still hasn't even bothered opening a convenience store. The building was however, much cheaper being unoccupied for around two years after its previous occupiers the housing association who controlled the surrounding estate moved to plush new purpose built accommodation. Two years on a further accommodation rationalisation drive saw more staff quitting their town centre locations and squeezed into our building. Some of our grumbles may seem churlish (lack of cycling facilities, lack of toilets, temperature), but staff reliant on public transport faced nightmare journeys, we became inaccessible to service users, no longer being centrally located made journeys for home visits longer and the lack of an open plan environment affected team-dynamics with literal walls solidifying into metaphorical barriers.

In short this story shows austerity is nothing new to local government it has been the norm, in my experience, for years. It therefore seems hard to see just how much more local government can drive down costs without performance being seriously compromised and by this I mean increased risks. This is important as local government will be the arena where cuts are most keenly felt. Take this post on the excellent Fighting Monsters Blog. The example given is of ILF payments being affected. These are, very sketchily put, where central government assists with funding for people under 65 living in the community, but who have needs above the threshold for residential care. By scaling this back more pressure is put on local authorities. I make a similar point in an earlier post on the resilience of public spending; the bottom-line is that the needs will still need to be met; the state being unable to walk away from instances of need which would otherwise go unmet. In this case it therefore means funding must be diverted from elsewhere by the local authority. In other words the ultimate responsibility for making the required cut is downloaded from central government to the local authority. The luxury for central government is it can then distance itself from making real, tangible cuts and also importantly absolve itself of responsibility when services do break down. Add to this the prospect of a council tax freeze and Local Government is in a very. very tight spot indeed.

Time to give care workers their due

2010-06-14T13:47:00.000-07:00

I've said it here before but won't ever tire of saying it. The undervaluing, underpaying and overworking of the staff who provide care is nothing short of scandalous and is the major barrier to improving standards.

I've seen many instances of how care staff are treated shabbily by local authorities keen to cut budgets and companies seeking to maximise profits. Job security, domestic arrangements, pay, conditions, and training all suffer. I'm also ashamed to say that the attitudes of some social care professionals towards front-line care staff were also pretty poor.

There is also the added dimension that this is gender issue as the majority of the workforce are female.

An article in the independent today captures some of these issues.

The message though is clear. The pay and condition of care workers matters to everyone in the social care universe; perhaps being even more important than subjects du jour like Individual Budgets.

The resilience of public spending...

2010-06-11T02:05:00.001-07:00

University is now all over until October. I picked up my final mark, my best yet, 75% for my essay on the voluntary sector. Now the hard part; figuring how I'm going to pay my tuition fees next year. It really is a struggle particularly as post-grad there is very little in the way of support. Whenever fees are mentioned my ears invariably prick-up. So it was with interest I heard David Willetts talking on the radio yesterday. He actually made a really good point which summed up just how hard it is to cut government spending. If fees are increased then loans and other financial support need to be increased, as these are mainly funded by the government you are really only shifting spending around. In addition to this making anything means tested also results in a huge amount of admin, an appeals process etc which ends up making things very expensive.

Personally I favour a graduate tax. My first degree was almost 10 years ago and as I didn't do great in the earnings stakes I still haven't reduced the capital and have not yet had a year where I met the interest. Because the loan has grown by so much I'm also unlikely to in the next few years so I am in fact paying a de-facto 10% tax on my earnings over 15k and will do for quite some time. This perverse effect means people like me who do less well out of a degree end up paying far more over the long term. The fairest system would then seem to be a graduate tax. If you do well then great you pay a bit more. If you don't do so well ,maybe you're working in the public sector or volunteering, then you pay less. Seems fairer to me.

The big issue is also one of equality. My university is red brick and I must be the only person there not decked out in Hollister or A& F topped off with some flip-flops. That the institution is horribly middle-class, not to mention young, is painfully visible by the sartorial choices of its members. Personally I'd prefer more diversity. I'd like to see more variety of age too, in fact I think I'm gaining far more from university now I am older and have more experience. I certainly know what the price of a 2:2 is!

Inevitability

2010-06-07T14:06:00.000-07:00

I'm very much with Alistair Darling. I don't profess to be an economics expert (B grade A-level Business and Economics), but I do remember the arguments in the 1990s about how economic globalisation meant the state had to shrink and employment protection laws had to loosen. These arguments usually professed that globalisation possessed the irresistibility and inevitability of a law of nature. As a result the argument was not about globalisation itself, but how to successfully adapt to it. The passing of time has led to some revision. It is now not just a fringe opinion to suggest that globalisation was in significant part a political project. Passing it of as an inevitability had been a cunning ruse on the part of neo-liberals in the US, Canada and UK to justify their attack on the post war welfare state.

In the UK Thatcher drew heavily on the intellectual foundation of Hayek who had critiqued the welfare state as detrimental to liberty and advocated instead a bare minimum safety net. The welfare state is however a resilient and thick skinned beast due to its popularity. In the UK our love for the NHS seemingly knows no bounds; we will happily volunteer, donate and run marathons for it. The neo-liberals therefore had a problem. How best to dismantle institutions without causing unrest and losing power?

The answer to this is to present what you are doing as an inevitability.

... such as the need to reduce the deficit

2010-06-03T02:31:00.000-07:00

I have long had a feeling that the people at the top have no idea how the organisations they are responsible for work. This was continually with me at the Council where it seemed there was a vast gulf between the front-line staff and the management strata immediately above the level of team manager.

Recently this feeling has returned as a result of reading Catch 22. The dark, resigned but comical accounts of the farcical manoeuvrings of the generals and senior officers reminding me more than a little of my former masters.

I'm glad to say I am not alone in my views. In an interesting piece in the Guardian a former front-line worker critiques IDSs knowledge of the system he is seeking to reform.

They really have no idea at the top!

University

2010-05-20T02:52:00.000-07:00

University life has a rhythm of peaks and troughs. You notice the change most in the library computer rooms. No longer is there screen after screen of facebook and you tube; replaced instead with complex looking graphs and charts of formulae which just looking at make me sigh with relief I chose the humanities all those years ago. Soon though it wil all be empty apart from a smattering of Phd students. The rest of us will have our feet up on the kind of tropical beach we try to visualise in our darkest times.. or more likely be working to finance the next years study (and don't get me started on tuition fees!).

For my part I'm just under halfway through my essay on the states approach to the voluntary sector. My task is to evaluate two thesis. One that the state is using the voluntary sector to save money on service delivery. The other that the state pragmatically recognises that the voluntary sector is just inherently better at delivering certain services.

There is plenty of topical material on this as despite (as suggested in earlier posts) greater government engagement with the sector as providers of services being the thrust of policymaking for over a decade it has now been all repackeged with the label of 'Big Society'. This is clearly for me quite a bad step as academics have been urging a more cautious approach to the merits of the sector. To be sure voluntary organisations do possess many advantages but there has been an over-stereotyping of the sector as 'innovative', 'flexible', 'responsive' and various labels which under scrutiny take on a more ambiguous complexity.

One issue issue now is whether we can really call the voluntary sector voluntary. I was on the receiving end of a friendly rebuke from a former colleague last year for using the term voluntary sector rather than the nom de jour of 'third sector.' Why the change? In the embrace of the state the sector has changed, become more professional and buracratic. 'Social enterprise' is another term which problematizes what we thought we knew about the sector the term enterprise implying that the profit motive is now no bar from membership of the sector.

Interestingly social care is at the fore-front of all this. The reason being that barriers to entry are low compared to say healthcare which requires considerable capital and expertise. Individual Budgets also present an opening for the sector to grow, particularly social enterprises.

My conclusions are not yet drawn, but my feelings are that there is indeed a need to be cautious and to not simply accept soundbites and stereotypes, but to look under rocks, prod and poke aropund and ask awkward questions.

The election.

2010-05-06T05:29:00.000-07:00

It's even nice to see people so engaged this time round after the malaise of the last two elections. Even a keen political commentator like myself, who votes in European and Local Elections, failed to show at the polling station for the last general election.

For a while Politics felt as competitive as premier league in the 90s the team in red always going on to lift the trophy, but now politics is in the air, and more importantly on the web too (see this excellent article on myshittytwenties) and facebook coming close to resembling a Roman Forum (incidentally I wrote a piece on this for my Uni paper but, like everything else I've submitted it has vanished without any kind of acknowledgement - might post it on here in the next few days).

Governments always tend to look tired after a decade or so in power and after a change of face failing to induce a Dr Who like freshness there is an inevitability that they will lose power. There is however, much uncertainty over who will gain power, will it be the Lib Dems in a coalition government or will the Conservatives manage to sneak a majority?

I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a hung parliament and the promise of electoral reform. Hung parliaments are rarer than unicorns in the first-past-the-post system but society now needs policy making to take place in an environment of negotiation where minority views from the likes of the Greens are heard as well as those of just the median voter; Worcester Woman, Motorway Man or whatever incarnation they choose to appear in. This is my hope for change.

and another thing...

2010-04-14T14:23:00.000-07:00

Working in social care certain words get a great deal of use. One word which passes the lips of anyone in the field with a rhythmic regularity is 'empowerment.' Empowerment is seen as a universaly positive guiding principle. As an employee I saw my role very clearly, I was there to empower; to empower people who had little power, to enable them to participate in the community and society in a manner which they chose to, not one which was dictated by society's predjudices and iniquities. The reality of course was more messy, taking a step back I performed functions counter to this aim; gatekeeping according to the norms of the institution I worked for and implementing policies (most notably a highly punative charging policy) which arguably disempowered. Empowerment though was soley thought of in the context of service users, staff empowerment was something which received little attention.

I consistently used to argue that staff needed to be empowered (and still do in the private sector where the situations seems even worse - though do so in hushed tones). Staff need to have the tools to do their jobs and their views need to be heard above service manager level, rather than being treated as irrelevant. In my old authourity several policy changes led to a number of quite major issues which many staff had been flagging up as areas of concern long before. The impact on me was that I felt very disempowered. One aspect of the Conservatives plans, announced yesterday, therefore does appeal. Encouraging staff to take control of service provision seems to be a radical step and one which could potentialy see hierarchical 'buracratic' organisations flatten and become responsive.

But isn't this inviting an animal farm type scenario; replacing the farmer (in this case an exec. director) with an oligopoly of professionals. Hierarchies can be flattened but power dynamics will always exist. The alternative is a more pure kind of constitutionaly protected democracy which results in levels of arguement which are personally draining for all participants. There are also the usual unanswered questions, how will this all work in practice, will this be in the context of quasi-markets where staff collectives compete against the third sector and private sector to provide services not to mention the obvious question, is this just a ploy to buy off professsionals who would otherwise be hostile to a policy of pushing state functions onto the third sector, a sweetner to assuage concerns of declining areas of influence for professionals? Or am I being cynical again?

View on the manifesto

2010-04-13T13:06:00.000-07:00

Are big centralised services so bad? The Conservatives seem to beleive so. Policy developments like Foundation Hospitals and Individual Budgets also suggest Labour feel the same so whatever the result of the forthcoming election we can expect the move towards smaller, localy planned and delivered services provided by a rang of providers to continue at either the same pace or an accelerated pace.

I'm uneasy with this development. On one hand I recall a conversation with a person from a Third sector organisation who talked about the ability they had to be able to provide services such as aromatherapy which their service users found valuable, but which would be unlikely to be made available by the authourity. This was clearly a prime example the benefits of the sector: closeness to service users means more responsiveness to their needs coupled with the ability to innovate free of burcratic controls.

The organisation was however, highly dependent on Local Authourity funding to provide itsservices and interestingly bemoaned the cutbacks which had been made within their service area in Local Authourity that had ironically been used to provide a chunk of their funding. The point of stating this is that the Third Sector is not a stand alone sector staffed by volunteers but is a sector dependent on funding which has been diverted from previously centralised services.

The experience of the last few years has been that the more involved Third Sector organisations become with service provision the more they need to dedicate time to funding bids, planning and reporting. This has led some to argue that the Third Sector has lost its distinctive character and now effectively many organisations ape the centralised, buracratic state bodies they are replacing. The opposing view is of course that closer working means more opportunity to influence the system (not disimmilar to the point made by Ben and Jerry's founders in the face of their take-over by Unilever that they hoped Ben and Jerry's distinctive values would influence the multinational rather than erase their own)

This leaves us with the disadvantages. Producer interest has been cited as becoming a problem in the Third Sector, increasing professionalisation means more professionals and more buracracy invariably increases distance from service users. The sectors advocacy function also becomes problematic in the context of closer working with state bodies. Most challenging though is the problem of inequality. The modern Third Sector has since it's emergence in the 1970s been a very middle-class animal, drawing on middle class volunteers and now professionals leading to accusations that it exasperates rather than releives inequality.

Of course many of these accusations can also be levelled at centralised state services. I do however, feel that rather than charging headlong alsong the course plotted for the past decade is dangerous, rather we need a period of soul searching in which we are realistic about the costs and benefits of all forms of welfare provision.

Civil-Society??

2010-04-01T11:47:00.000-07:00

I once saw Tony Blair in the flesh at a sixth form confrence in 1997. Held within spitting distance of the Houses of Parliament the other attractions on the bill were an impressive Paddy Ashdown who provided a fiery, passionate performance. The incumbent government busy staving off the by then clearly apparent slide into the electoral wilderness was only able to spare the embattled David Mellor who was fodder to some of the more snide questions eminating from the audience 'What does Mr Mellor think about the country being run by a bunch of adulterors and perverts?' jeered one public-school sixth former. Mellor like a bear chained at a medieval fete lashed out at his tormentors by responding to another questioner that you can't account for the electorate as 'there is one in every village.' Contrastingly the questions aimed at Tony Blair were positively fawning 'why do you want to be prime-minister?' one person asked resulting in Tony's trademark grin to appear, shining from the podium like a beacon of hope to the assembled room; most of whom had known nothing but Tory rule.The atmosphere in the room was one of love. Blair was our Obama. Even after our dissapointment we still love Tony, he is the archytype of the post-modern politician, free-floating and unencumbered by ideology - at least to the T.V cameras, a charismatic prescence. The reason we don't take to Brown is because he is the opposite of Blair and the reason Cameron struggles is because he, the natural hier to Blair (who was in turn Thatcher's child) fails to step out of his shadow and become anything more than Blair-lite.

And so to yesterday. Cameron outlines his plans for re-energising Civic-Society setting out a vision of how we all have responsibilities to become involved with our communities whilst waxing lyrical about the voluntary sector. Was this Communitarian perspective not Blair's baby? Forgive me for not having the wool pulled over my eyes but, The Compacts New Labour made with the voluntary sector in the late 1990s, the New Deal for Communities, Futurebuilders, The Supporting People Programme, Individual budgets... haven't all of these New-Labour initiatives been born from the idea that the Voluntary, or 'third sector' should have a greater role in society? Yep, everyone still loves Tony.

In praise of the public sector

2010-03-04T09:38:00.001-08:00

The past week has seen me reflecting on a conversation with a friend who has also worked in the public and private sectors. When asked which I preferred I had to say that my heart still belongs to the public sector. The one real difference I have noticed between the public/private sector is that in the public sector I felt as if my opinion was valued and that there was an equality between staff, senior managers and front-line workers being all equal under the rules of the organisation.

My observations in the private sector remind me of something I once read; explaining the failure of a respected English football manager in Holland it pointed to the difference in footballing cultures. In England players expected to be instructed by the manager, in other words all authority was invested in that one figure, but in Holland players discussed issues with each other and came to collective solutions. Thus it is also with the public sector.

Is it any accident the Dutch are envied the world over for their footballing culture?

2010-03-02T12:18:00.000-08:00

Did I get out of local government at the right time?

Sat in the comfort of my private sector call centre I came across a gem of a comment on the BBC news website (as you know the only website my employer allows non-supervisory staff to view - no doubt the Guardian is strictly off limits for it's revolutionary potential). The main article is one of a plethora about the subject du jour the impending dismemberment of the public sector (is that a bit grisly? - I'm currently reading a Japanese Horror/Thriller called 'out' so maybe thats why the metaphor springs to mind - we're constantly told it's going to be a brutal messy affair so maybe it's not too inappropriate after all.) Anyhow the comment itself is by a reader named 'departurelounge' and just seems to overlap nicely with my own experiences. The original can be seen here , it's the first comment at the bottom, but here is a copy and paste job:

1. At 2:06pm on 01 Mar 2010, departurelounge wrote:
Having recently left local government and soon to leave the country for good I've been reflecting on why my decade in local government seemed so fruitless. My time coincided with buzzwords like partnerships, visions, sustainable community strategies and the like. What tended to happen was that not very imaginative people drew up inconsequential plans which served only to distract attention from what could actually and ought to be done. Central government piled on initiatives and duties on local government to end child poverty, fuel poverty promote democracy etc when local authorities have very few levers to achieve these things (if any level of government can actually significanlty affect these thigns is another question). Local politicians werre either unwilling or unable to focus the minds of their administrative machines on improving services, controlling costs or really responding to local demands and the result is an expensive system tha, in practice, looks to central government for what to do next, not local people or their representatives. The frustrating thing is that local government isn't evne very good at doing the wrong thing, doing the bidding of central government.

2010-02-15T15:15:00.000-08:00

Watching the world of social care at the moment is like watching a firework display. Ideas shoot into the sky painting it with colourful visions which last the briefest of moments before sliding into intangibility trapped within memory whilst the embers meet the embrace of the November mud.

Today the Conservatives fired their rocket into the sky. Headlines were set alight by the
spectacle of the Tories… yes the Tories… outlining plans for workers co-operatives in delivering public-services.

The use of the term workers co-operative, a term associated more with the political left was designed to make a big bang, but is it really as un-tory as it looks? If we cast aside the practical implication, which some commentators feel present serious questions, and concentrate on the core elements it begins to look very, very Tory and presents the real vision of the changes which will be made by a Tory government.

Looking at the heart of the plans it seems the Tories still harbour a hatred of centralised bureaucracies and feel that Labour, although continuing the work of the Thatcher and Major years, has not gone far enough, fast enough or been nearly radical enough.

An interesting concept I learnt at uni this week is the idea that privitisation is not a binary of public/private provision but there are degrees between the poles and three elements, provision, funding, and regulation: for example the state may not provide a service, such as residential care, but will regulate and/or fund it. IB’s interestingly represent a further move towards pure private as regulation becomes almost impossible in such a fragmented market.

But, this aside when we think of privitisation what has happened so far has only been a very few tentative steps into the woods, the state still retains the real power of funding and regulation. The building blocks are there. foundation hospitals, city academies, will the state remove the regulatory framework in favour of a market mechanism where the logic dictates that greater choice will mean poor providers will be unable to survive?

Who killed free personal care?

2010-02-10T16:36:00.000-08:00

Forget who killed Archie in Eastenders. If you want twists, turns, skulduggery and intrigue look no further than the free personal care at home bill.

It seems that what began as a pledge for free care has turned into a fairly large flat fee paid on either retirement or death

I freely admit to having lost track of what is going on. The thought of a flat-fee on retirement worries me; what about people who are not yet at retirement age, how does this affect IB's, what will the thresholds be? One thing I am certain of is that this is not the way to make policy. Service users, workers and carers all deserve more than this.

New Semester and Old Friends

2010-02-05T04:17:00.000-08:00

I'm currently reading an excellent book called The Rider by Tim Krabbe. It's about cycle racing a sport which I have been intrigued about since heading to London a few years back to watch the Tour Prologue. I was led there by my love of simply just being on my bike, but my knowledge serbved only by faded memories of the Tour on Channel 4. This meant I didn't really know what was going on but the full-frontal assault of the publicity caravan with its shower of gallic gifts from Hotel Etap pens to Laughing Cow fridge magnets engulfed me in the atmosphere like a peloton mercilessly swallows a lone rider. The smudges of garish colour burnt onto the pixels of my too-slow camera and indelibly in my mind led me to read about the tragedy of Tom Simpson on the moonlike Mont Ventoux, the struggles of the unsung domestique and the pantomine that has always been the Tour de France. These however, are only background to The Rider. Krabbe, a cycle racer himself, invites you deep inside his mind during a fictitious race. This however, serves as a vehicle for an exploration of the real emotions of the racer. The garish colours are stripped away allowing the obsession, pain and determination to glow with flourescent force.

I know I can never be a cycle racer, I do not possess the masochism or ability to ignore pain that is the stock-in-trade of the rider. But, the emotions feel familiar - they should to all of us. We are all involved in our own cycle race. Sometimes we collaborate, sometimes sitting in anothers draft and sometimes we break out alone. We struggle up mountains and try to hold our nerve as we hurtle down the other side. We stretch our mental and physical abilities with an eye on the finish line. University certainly feels this way to me - essay deadlines being like the crest of mountains.

At the moment I am enjoying a section of the race on the flat where the rhythm is more relaxed. I've just been to an introductory seminar for my second unit this semester. The subject of this, and my other unit, is on changes in the delivery of welfare - particularly the involvement of the private sector and voluntary sector in welfare delivery. A subject I'm particularly interested in and intend to enjoy before I reach the next mountain.

I will also be seeing a lot of my old social-services colleagues tonight. It should be a nice get together as even though promises were made to keep in contact these were, despite good intentions, buried under layers of work and other commitments. I will however, have to try to refrain from getting too carried away in discussing social policy!

The Beeb reports

2010-02-01T12:26:00.000-08:00

I'm currently paying my way through my uni course by working in a call centre three days a week. For some reason my employers provide internet access but this is limited to the BBC web domain. Exploring this is like exploring Wookey Hole caves with its hidden chambers slowly revealed by deeper and deeper dives into the dark waters. One of my best discoveries to date is a wonderful text based adventure game based on the Hitchikers Guide to ther Galaxy. My main stomping grounds are the news and sport pages. I'm not a huge fan of BBC news, but 9-5 it's all I've got. Today I also noticed an article directly related to the post I made yesterday about the Governments plans for free social care.

According the BBC report the schemes financial projections have been called into question by the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services (ADASS). It turns out the Government assumed that the average cost for a care package for someone meeting the criical criteria is around £100 a week. ADASS on the other hand estimeate it at £200. A figure which from my care management experience appears more realistic. The effect of this underestimate is, the article suggests a £500m funding shortfall which falls squarely on the shoulders of local authorities.

Interestingly elsewhere on the site is an article about a report by former civil-service insiders which in criticising poor legislation fingers the Personal Care at Home Bill as a possible example of legislation which is not sufficiently thought through.

Perhaps yesterday I overstated what I felt was the agenda behind the legislation. To be sure I beleive there is a long term trend for increasing white-collar privitisation in local government but, maybe and this is equally worrying policymakers in government are simply making it up as they go along informed by nothing more than their hunches. To me this is a proposition more worrying than the hypothesis I put forward yesterday.

There are certainly a whole load of logistical issues. One which springs instantly to mind is that care managers will find themselves pressured on one hand by service users and families keen to receive free services and the authourity on the other hand which wants to protect its budget. Has anyone thought of this?

#welovetheNHS

2010-01-30T12:41:00.000-08:00

We all love the NHS. So much so that when it was slurred in the context of an American political debate thousands of people inventively hollered their support from cyberspaces newest technological rooftop.

We love the NHS for one simple reason. It is universal - Simply put it means the same to all of us; healthcare when we need it without regard to our material or social position. The NHS is the most true monument to the thinking which underpinned the development of the welfare state; All citizens, not just those who succeed via the free market, possessing rights; rights to education, rights to health, rights to live a fulfilled life.

Well, there are two reasons we love the NHS. The second is that despite Thatchers attempts at destabilisation in the late 1980s it delivers a high standard of care. Though to be fair to myself this is linked much more closely with universalism than is first thought. Universal services tend to be of higher quality and like the NHS are far more resilient to Politicians cutting funding. Cut Jobseekers allowance - the unemployed suffer. Cut a local hospitals budget we all suffer.

So what are we to make of the Government's suggestion for a "National Care Service". The name choice seems like a supermarket own-brand cola brands attempt at aping coca-colas distinctive packaging - in effect branding piggybacking; in this case suggestive of the national standard and universal entitlements of our beloved NHS. But will we be getting the real thing or a cup of water with a spoonful of sugar and a drop of food dye?

Social Care on the other hand combines universalism with it's opposite number selectivism. We are all entitled to an assessment and to services but when it comes to funding services this is by way of means-testing which varies across local authorities and can be in some cases quite punitive, by the Government's own admission penalising those on middle-incomes or with savings. The Government's plans keep this structure in place for the vast majority of service users but add an outhouse of universalism for the much lower number of people with the highest level of need. Local authorities will also still be in charge of delivering services which will mean that National standards will be logistically hard to implement and postcode lottery most likely to be the result.

As this article points out the National Care Service idea seems to have materialised from nowhere. There was certainly no talk of it when I was still in an authourity at the tail end of last year. Which all begs the question... just what is going on?

I beleive there is a divorce taking place between care management and social work. If the kind of initiatives I have seen piloted in the last couple of years such as individual budgets, self-assessment and care management being carried out by voluntary sector 'Brokers' works out as planned then Government can scale back their involvement in this area, concentrating instead on service users with high-level and complex cases which are primarily the realm of qualified social workers. A National Care Service encompasing only this latter area and which overlaps with the NHS and its universal ethos would certainly be a way of creating a framework in which this could be achieved.

This would be entirely consistent with what has been happening at a local level. Since the 1980s local authourities have increasingly outsourced. Beginning with workers in peripheral activities and/or at the bottom of local government pay scales, cleaners, cooks, carers, the tide has been rising higher up the pay grades, council tax officers, finance officers, IT technicians, HR, payroll are now likely to be found with ID badges bearing the tell-tell words of privitisation: 'working with.' The future is I beleive one where authourities will consist of a rump of qualified professionals involved in complex cases or enforcement functions; town planners, highway engineers, and social workers who will direct and supervise work carried out by outsourced non-qualified staff.

Closing the gap

2010-01-27T14:08:00.000-08:00

The depressing news that inequality is today worse than the 1970s comes as little surprise. One of the points made in the BBC report is how this is embarrasing for a government which has set out with the aim of tackling inequality.

I am reminded that a couple of years ago my directorate listed 'closing the gap' among its core aims. Its fate was to be eventually dropped by an incoming Conservative administration but for the couple of years of its tenure it seemed a noble objective.

In my experience however, the authority did little to reach out across barrriers. Changes were introduced so leaflets in surgeries and other locations disappeared in favour of 'factsheets' online and translated leaflets became only available on request. The service became in effect only visable to those who had the resources to search for it. Service users on low to middle incomes also faced the biggest squeeze when the financal assesment procedures were overhauled.

The trouble is that the policy aims were like a piece of soviet-era rhetoric, a doctrine of equality preached by a comfortably-off political class with no real commitment to them apart from as a smokescreen. I once quizzed our Executive Director about how a policy which could be detrimental to this aim could be amended to take equality into consideration only to be told, reveallingly, that 'social levelling' was not the aim of the policy in question. This left me to wonder what the point of aims, charters and in my authourity's best jargon 'golden-threads' (the process by which the core aims filtered down to ground level actions) are apart from to impose a layer of hyper-reality where we supposedly work towards an aim but by our actions move ever further from it.

Social-care has a crucial role to play in pushing for greater equality. In my city it was no accident that the busiest team covered the worst-off area of the city. There are undisputed links between poverty and poor health. Conditions such as COPD and diabetes are more likely to affect the poorest. We need a more pro-active social care agenda which is not afraid to question policies, to empower individuals and communities, and to find new ways of working with education, health and other services to prevent needs arising. But, we can only do this if we mean it, if we really care about closing the gap.

Predictions

2010-01-25T14:47:00.000-08:00

In the last week I've reached a milestone. I now automatically write the date as 2010, no longer is my official correspondance besmirched by a scruffily scrubbed out 09.

Social care is also at something of a milestone. Twenty years since the last major piece of legislation the 1990 NHS and Community Care Act.

Interestingly major legislation appears to come neatly in two decade cycles. The 1948 NA act and 1970 CSDP act both preceding the 1990 act. In terms of adult services this previous legislation has remained on the statute book - there has never been a clean sweep of the legislative broom with the result that the legislative framework takes on a the architectural characteristics of Hampton Court Palace with wings added, rooms refurbished, new facades and repaired fire damage. Can we expect another addition to this mix in the next few years and if so what shape will it take?

There has been an attitude shift at the heart of the welfare state. Beneficiaries are no longer the passive recipients of the Beveridge era but are in policy terms becoming 'active' This is very much a rights and responsibilities issue and has been seen so far in unemployment benefit where recipients are expected to enter into a contract to actively look for work and update their skills. For social care it will mean a shift in emphasis from a care manager planning a care package and providing services contracted through the local authourity; instead it will mean an individual deciding on their own sources of support and managing this. In other words a person will have a right to care but the responsibility to plan and arrange it.

I also expect the way in which care is funded to change. My initial reading had been that there was an expectation that the cash locked in glacial-like block contracts would as they melted in the new climate mingle with funding streams from the voluntary and private sectors to create a fertile valley of healthy diverse services resulting in savings. This expectation was wildly optimistic. The cheapest way of providing services is by uniform en-masse block contracts with in-built economies of scale. I wouldn't be surprised to see a modified AA and DLA given more of a centre-stage role when it comes to funding care packages and longer term beleive there may well be a move toward a social-insurance type scheme with a degree of state and private sector involvement. I also expect the directly paid workforce in local authorities to be reduced to social workers focused on safeguarding work and a rump of care managers focused on auditing and approving care packages with activities such as setting up care, dealing with minor issues and completing assessment forms to be carried out by the voluntary sector.

It is impossible to predict however, whether these changes will be good or bad. There are certainly concerns. My biggest concern would be middle-class opt-out. Under personalisation the middle class who can top-up may opt out leaving those less well off or with complex needs in receipt of residual services - possibly offered by a local authourity as a 'safety-net'. In social policy there is a wealth of literature to suggest middle class opt-out has huge negative affects on services which become more succeptible to funding cuts. Just think about the arguements that schools fail when the middle class pull their children out.

This and other issues remain a question of government. Both parties favour personalisation. It is a curious issue where the critique of the right has informed the actions of the left. The parties will I beleive differ in their emphasis on elements of the policy with the Tories true to type favouring a more private sector based funding resolution wheras Labour will favour the road of voluntary sector partnerships.

Happy New Year

2010-01-04T17:59:00.000-08:00

A slightly belated happy New Year to everyone and welcome to a new decade. In the spirit of the time of year I will offer a review of the year as it has affected me personally and professionally before I look into my social care crystal ball to offer some predictions for the year or decade to come.

Firstly the personal and professional. 2009 saw me finally get my break as an unqualified care manager via a secondment opportunity from mid-January to mid-October. I then ended my almost five year association with the authority at the end of October. The end came as I had two years previously, fresh out of a relationship and into career doldrums, decided to apply for an MSc in Social Policy which I deferred for a year. Just after taking up my place at the beginning of October, using reserves of annual leave to attend lectures, I was interviewed for and offered a permanent care management post, the catch was that they couldn’t accommodate my request for part-time hours. This resulted in an agonising overnight decision with much tossing and turning in bed. I had been attempting since 2006 to obtain a care management post but I had started the MSc and was enjoying it as policy had been a particular interest of mine. I decided that my long-term goal of a job in a policy capacity would best be achieved by remaining on the course. I also felt the need of a change of scenery to rejuvenate me so I handed in my notice.

As of now I am still on the course, I am also achieving pass marks but, as it has been seven years since my last determined academic effort I have found the going tough. The Christmas break ended today and I have a deadline approaching in a couple of weeks for an essay on New Social Risks. I am working harder than ever before, working in a call centre four days a week and spending late nights in the library. I have now cut work down to three days and have had a chance to relax a bit over Christmas – though it has awakened memories of being able to put my feet up in the evenings.

Part of my course has involved learning about comparative social policy, the practice of comparing welfare regimes across the continent. The logic of this is that there is only so much you can learn about a welfare state by studying it in isolation. So it is with work. Leaving the field has been a learning experience in itself. In my call centre role, the one change I notice is the lack of pressure. This struck me just before Christmas. Local weather conditions conspired to leave the city resembling an ice rink in the morning. As I slid to work amidst surreal scenes of abandoned cars and pedestrians trudging in the road, car and bicycle travel an impossibility, I passed a warden assisted block. I suddenly thought of my former colleagues. Some of them would have arrived in the office, found half their colleagues hadn’t been able to get in. Then the calls would begin. Carers would be unable to get into work so clients would not get their visits. Med prompts, meals and personal care would be seriously delayed or missed. Someone would need to establish which calls were really, really essential and try to get a stretched Rapid Response team to visit. The day care bus wouldn’t have been able to get round, people would need to have something to eat as they wouldn’t eat at day centre, Meals on Wheels would also be affected so that wouldn’t be an option……… I sent one of my friends in my old team a text to say I was thinking of her. I knew what sort of day she would be having. Heroic.

Language games

2009-11-26T08:08:00.000-08:00

What is the correct term for a person who has involvement with the social care sector? In my experience there was in practice no real concrete guidance, individuals largely left to make their own decisions, though like a swarm of bees almost everyone settled on ‘client’, or ‘service user’. In the case of joint working teams the medical professionals stuck resolutely to their classic label of ‘patient’.

The lack of guidance is surprising as the terms we use to describe people are often highly loaded, crystallising the whole histories of professions and influencing the way practitioners relate to the people they work with. Patient, the dominant term in medicine, is regarded by suspicion by social care carrying as it does connotations of passivity in the face of the all conquering medical paradigm. I also find service user difficult as many people I came into contact with were not, or did not wish to be, in receipt of any services.

It is client however, which I have enormous difficulty with. On one hand it does distribute power more evenly between an individual and the organisation, but its origins are rooted in the consumerist conception of the welfare state which I regard with some suspicion. When we speak of clients we imagine somebody who is purchasing a service and entering into a contract. Fine. Perhaps. This view has delivered some improvements through increasing choice and accountability, but at the cost of increasing means-testing. ‘Clients’ increasingly do - literally purchase their care with the Local Authourity acting as broker. Services such as care are no longer a right more an option; if you wish to pay for it. It’s often struck me as an unfair that if you require medical treatment, the state will, quite rightly, cover the cost of this. However, if you happen to need a carer to enable you to go about your daily life, this can be at the cost of a large portion, or in other cases all, of your savings and income. The term client is less innocent than it appears, but is it possible to have a world without such labels?

The downside to professionalisation

2009-11-12T15:03:00.000-08:00

I've been in an essay mode recently, a condition a friend once referred to as 'nesting', I'm surrounded by paper; handwritten lecture notes, books, photocopied chapters, and memos scrawled in a desperate attempt to capture inspiration like a delicate butterfly in a net. I plan to enjoy a weekend of relaxation before clearing the floor ready for my next essay due in two weeks time. No doubt this scene is being replicated in rooms across the country. From Newcastle to Exeter invitations shunned, partners asked for understanding and sacrifices being made in the hope that a good grade means a better future.

From 2012 a three or four year university degree will be the only route of entry to the nursing profession. I have mixed feelings about this. I wrote an essay on the nursing profession as an undergraduate in the early noughties about the politics of the profession. It didn't get me a good grade, but it introduced me to the debate in nursing between on one hand the Florence Nightingale School of nursing which emphasised the pastoral, caring side of nursing and the Mrs Bedford Fenwick school which argued for minimum training standards, registration and increased professionalism. These polar positions have endured through the creation of a universal NHS and can be clearly seen the views put forward today by the RCN and the Patients Association.

For me I feel that both elements have a point. I recognise that the health service has moved on and requires increased specialist skills, but I cannot help agreeing with some of the views expressed on the BBC 6 o'clock news that a 3 or 4 year degree format may put many potentially good nurses off entering the profession. In many ways the story of Nursing and Social Work are similar, both can trace their early development to Victorian amateur pioneers, both have struggled with gender discourses and both have seen groups fighting for increased professional recognition.

One issue in social care has been the creation of a two-tier workforce with unqualified workers experiencing reduced status - as humorously documented in Clare in the Community (October 10th 2007) , fewer development opportunities, and career ceilings. All of which leads to workers with years of experience leaving the field rather than opting to take a three or four year degree. The importance of unqualified workers is often ignored, even in papers such as the Guardian; they rarely appear in accounts which talk of 'the profession'. I was shocked when I first walked into my office to discover that in a team of around 12 there were only two qualified Social Workers, one being the team manager, so in terms of front line workers there was only one qualified Social Worker. It is not my intention here to critique the Social Work degree. My point is that raising barriers to a profession can be problematic. I have had the pleasure of working with many dedicated and competent unqualified workers, who would be regarded as social workers in other parts of the world, many who could have so much more to offer.

In the name of liberal democracy..

2009-10-25T10:55:00.000-07:00

My feet have gone beyond aching, but finally after months of build-up, which has led to a few things this blog included being neglected, it's over. I'm promising myself never, never, never-ever again just like I did last year, but this time I mean it. I haven't run a marathon or gone for an agonisingly long hill-laden distance bike ride, no; I've just been collecting peoples names for the register of electors.

It all starts in August. A couple of pleasant sunny mornings spent posting letters containing the forms through peoples doors. Just as the leaves are turning yellow come the reminders in September. Then October; Stage 3 - the door knocking stage. Stage 3 involves knocking on the door of every non-responding address twice. The statutory time frame for this is the 9th - 26th October. The sociology graduate in me finds this stage interesting. The Chicago School of Urban Ecology Theorists after all felt in order to get under the skin of a city to really know how it works you need to wear out as much shoe leather as possible.

My area for the past two years is what the Chicago School Theorists would term the zone of transition; an area near the very centre of the city with a transient population which serves as an arrival point for recent migrants. This would of course be a gross over-simplification of the dynamic of the area, where individual streets change in character from top to bottom, but provides a broad-brush stroked overview.

Many of the buildings are Victorian, built in the late 1800s and have, ironically through neglect, retained many original features. Many of the mosaiced paths leading to the front doors remain intact. Whilst not quite in the same league as Fishbourne they nevertheless are elegant, attractive features that put any homes built in the last 100 years to shame. Stained glass designs rest above doorways and many porches are brightened by ceramic glazed tiles in a multitude or shapes, colours and designs. No doubt conscientious owner occupiers would have long ago ripped these out to be replaced with whatever was de-jour. Another irony is it is the grandest of these homes, the victorian palaces at the end of tree lined streets abutting the main throughfare, which my Grandmother recalled as the posh part of town, that are now home to the most transient populations; their cavernous shells sectioned into single room dwellings.

Regeneration since the mid 1990s has transformed the area; once known as the red-light district. Investement in health centres and community facilities have been combined with City Patrol vehicles surveying the streets with mounted cameras and community based policing methods to reduce minor anti-social behaviour such as on-street drinking and drunkeness which had provided the area with its former reputation.

In the course of knocking on peoples doors the overwhelmingly majority were friendly even if many chose not to register to vote. Now, here is the difficulty with stage 3. My area has a very low response rate to Stages 1 and 2, in fact this year a response was not received from 593 properties which means potentially knocking on doors 1186 times. This is not just an issue for my feet, but is a huge problem for democracy. Anecdotally the people most reluctant to register are the most margianalised. Hardly any of the residents in the large houses sectioned into bed-sits register and many new eastern-europeans are also highly unlikely to register.

Working in local government I know that politics does matter, political decisions do impact our daily lives, particularly the lives of the most vulnerable who are more likely to be in contact with Health, Social Care, Housing and other services. Marginal groups and new immigrants are also vulnerable to being used as scapegoats for social problems by politicians eager to squeeze votes out of those who do register, but without registering to vote what hope do the marginalised have of having a voice to answer back?

Inequality: The Elephant in the Room

2009-10-05T12:10:00.000-07:00

After a few weeks behind my usual desk and a couple of hectic, lunchbreak free duty days the memory of the relaxed week I spent with the new team is heading on a one-way ticket to my subconscious. There is however, one aspect of the week which troubles me and has been the cause for some reflection.

In my second day on-loan to the newly formed, freshly relocated team I stepped out of the office to take a lunchtime meander. The office, a grim, dull building, is located on the West side of the City at the end of a long shopping street; the sort of street that is near to a town centre, but a world apart. 99p shops, Greggs the Bakers, an empty Woolies leaving a gap like a freshly pulled tooth, pawn brokers, cash converters, assorted charity shops, a KFC and a shop selling mobility scooters. What struck me most of all however, was how there seemed to be a far higher number of people who appeared to be in poor health with oxygen bottles, missing limbs and mobility scooters.

I was troubled as to whether this was the anecdotal observation of a Flaneur born of some kind of class-snobbery so last week, over another lunchbreak I went in search of hard data. A quick Google search instantly came up with what I was looking for. On an NHS site I found the following passage:

"Predictably, poorer health indicators are common in the most deprived wards and are a dominant feature of west ............ Compared to the rest of the City, people living in poorer areas have a 27% higher overall death rate and a 47% higher death rate for heart disease and stroke. Specific health problems include high teenage pregnancy rates, high accident rates and poor dental health in children."

Not coincidentally this side of town is home to the highest proportion of Social Care service users. Poverty and inequality have long been known to been implicated in conditions such as COPD, mental health issues, obesity and diabetes.

From an insiders view of service cutbacks, understaffing and a new charging policy which has sparked protests outside City Hall it is clear there is a funding crisis in the Social Care field. This is publicly acknowledged by the Government. The latest Government initiative 'The Big Care Debate' frames the issue in terms of the crisis being a by-product of us living longer. The elephant in the room however, seems to be the effect on health and the need for long-term services generated by poverty and inequality. The complex needs arising from and exasperated by poor housing, mental health issues, lack of resources and poor education. Inequalities many of which have grown unchecked for a generation and need to be tackled.

Follies and IT Problems

2009-09-24T15:30:00.000-07:00

It’s been a tough week back in my usual team. I’ve just enjoyed a very relaxed week ‘on-loan’ to another team during their re-organisation and office move. This I was told as I reported for my first day involved holding the fort for them by acting as duty Care Manager for a week. Fortunately for me the fort saw less action than one of Palmerston’s follies.

I was struck by the difference in culture between my host team and my regular team. In my new team people made tea for eachother, it seems like a small detail but it’s one which is telling. I felt supported and immediately hit it off with all of the team over their regular Monday pub lunch. It started to feel a lot like the French philosophy of work rather than the Anglo-Saxon definition. I wondered with the changes, which will surely over time mean increased workloads, whether this cordiality would disappear. Was the pub lunch like France the day Sarkozy was elected; did change loom in the air?

I was confronted by bureaucracy on the second day the day of the actual move. On of the key elements of the structural change is the merger of NHS teams with Social Services Teams. Community Matrons, Physiotherapists, Care Managers, Rehab Assistants and Social Workers all working together. This presents an IT nightmare. The computers we were using were owned by the NHS Primary Care Trust (PCT). To access these you needed a PCT log-in. Once logged in a separate portal could be used to log-in to the Local Authorities system. In accordance with the Authority’s approach to forward planning nobody had seen fit to issue me with a PCT log in. I was given a number of PCT IT support. I called only to be told that I needed a form completed by a manager to get a log in…. fair enough…. How long does it take?.... “a week” was the curt reply. I ended up, with a managerial blind-eye being turned, using other peoples PCT log-in and then logging myself into the Authority’s system. Unfortunately a security feature means that when the computers switch to power save mode they automatically lock. Not good when the person who’s log on you have used is out of the office and not answering their mobile. My colleagues with PCT log-ins fared no better, some were left without desks, computers, access to printers and others were caught in the middle of a ping-pong match between the Authority’s IT services and the PCT IT services over who was responsible for supplying the fix for each particular IT problem.

Somehow we managed to keep the service together. In part due to the help of my usual team who always play the role of sweeper in the organisation, however, also because it has been decided that though ‘professionals’ (the definition of which is still under debate) can refer directly to the new teams they will not be told they have to until November. This buys the new teams some breathing space. As for November…..

The Future

2009-09-13T14:55:00.000-07:00

Sunday mornings; A stray thought of work appears in my head like a lone cloud in an otherwise clear sky signalling the end of that perfect sunny day. Sunday night; There is only brushing my teeth, 15-20 pages of reading my book (currently my escape fantasies are being sated by My 'Dam Life; Three Years in Holland by Sean Condon), and finally shutting my eyes, between me and a week of stress, boredom, and frustration which will make me either a.) want to or b.)actually bang my head on my desk.

The coming week, now approaching faster than Lewis Hamilton, is like a September morning; Difficult to read in it's ambiguity. The reason? The long planned structural changes will be going live. I will be with one of the new teams for the week. On one hand I'm excited. My current desk has over three years become over familiar like a cell is to a lifer who can picture every nuance of every brick with their eyes firmly shut. But there is the lone cloud. Will it pass by like a lone-wolf or is it an outrider, leading the snarling storm in it's wake?

Certainly the conversations I have had during the week lead me towards the latter hypothesis. Oh well; Time to brush my teeth.

Underpaid and undervalued.

2009-09-09T02:07:00.000-07:00

I've just been reading an article published on the excellent Guardian Unlimited society section. Finally a Government Minister Andy Burnham, seems to be facing up to the reality that downward pressure on carers wages is undermining the quality of services.

I'm something of a prolific commenter on the society pages and posted my thoughts under the name enzee199:

When I first entered the field 5 years ago my Local Authourity was paying around of £15.00 per hour to block contract providers. Under the latest agreements rates are as low as £11 per hour. Add the affect of inflation and this is quite a decline.
Social Care is a labour intensive business so a significant chunk of the savings will undoubtably have come straight out of carers pay packets.
As well as this, at a time when 'local' service provision is being championed by policy guru's, declining rates favour large national providers who can gain economies of scale in the back-office functions like HR, legal, payroll, and training, edging out local or regional providers in the race to snap up LA contracts.
I don't see this situation improving, at least for the average less well-off service user, with developments like IB's. Unless a friend or family member is willing to help out for the amount a LA will pay then they will be forced to purchase care from a national provider or face paying a top-up mirroring the situation with residential care i.e the LA will pay for a bog-standard room in one of the less desierable homes unless you have a family member who wants to pay extra so you have more choice.

Change Part II - Plus-Ca-Change

2009-09-01T11:46:00.000-07:00

Since the mid 90s I've had an allegiance for Brighton and Hove Albion FC. When I was 14 this involved getting my mum and step-dad to drive for several hours to the Goldstone ground so I could buy a signed football and a replica shirt (in the days before the internet purchases like this necessitated a big adventure) . It seems irrational. I've only ever to this day seen the first team play once and at the time had no real connections with the Brighton area. In any case the Brighton area of the mid-90s was certainly not the sanitised vision of fun, funky, Brighton-based web-designer, sushi, sexy, creativity it is today. It was still dragging itself out of a pretty painful 1980s which had earned it the nickname skidrow-on-sea. Gentrification had not yet arrived to turf the giro-playboys out of the neglected Georgian buildings turned into bedsits and the city had a nasty heroin habit.

I am however, a sucker for the underdog and that is exactly what Brighton were at that point in their history. The club were in serious financial trouble, way before it became fashionable for clubs to call in the receivers once in a while, and were about to lose the Goldstone Ground to ground-share with Gillingham in Kent giving fans a huge round trip for a 'home' game. The team unsurprisingly were getting stuffed on the pitch at one point almost dropping out of the league altogether.

During these days I have one abiding image, burned into consciousness. Watching Brighton getting thrashed on a videotaped episode of Endsleigh League Extra I remember one of the players, a defender, head hanging in helpless desperation as the opposing striker sprinted joyously, arms aloft, back to his team-mates after slotting home something like the fourth goal against them. The look was one of complete demoralization. His eyes betrayed that he had faced the horrible realisation that no matter how hard he sweated, battled and strained it would be in vain as he was just one part of a system, a system which was no longer working and could not be saved by any one of its constituent parts.

Working for a Social Services department I know how that player feels.

Only the other week my team were told of how the planned reorganisation, mentioned in my earlier post 'Change', would be affecting us; that is despite previous assurances to the contrary. We were then told many of us would need to spend a week at the other teams to help-out with the transition as the teams would take on responsibility for referrals made to Social Services by 'professionals.' The remainder of the team would stay behind and continue to deal with referrals made by the general public which equates to very roughly 50% of our current workload.

We have today been advised of a slight re-think to the plans (due to go ahead in two weeks). Whilst professionals have been told they will need to refer directly to the new teams when the switch-over takes place if they do happen to call the main switchboard (operated by Capita) instead the referral will then be dealt with by my team. If this alone doesn't have the potential for confusion there will also be the fact that on day one many of the teams will be moving to new offices, unpacking, arranging files, desks etc and some apparently plan to just put the answerphone on.

Three of us, including myself, will still be going to another team. There will be no briefing from management about what we are expected to do whilst with the teams. My own management have told me that we're not there to shift boxes and if this happens to come straight back.

I'm starting to feel like that defender again.

The Fear

2009-08-28T09:48:00.000-07:00

Every so often, usually as a "friendly" Alsatian leaps towards your jugular, someone, the owner, will utter "don't be afraid they can smell fear." If dogs can really smell fear then a Social Services office will turn the most docile lapdog into a snarling frenzy, whizzing round in an incoherent blur like the Tasmanian Devil in a town centre after a night on the Stella.

Social Services offices operate on pure fear. Social Workers fear that they're one mistake, one bad call, one lapse of memory away from putting a client at risk. Unqualified staff are terrified of getting out of their depth and being swept away by swift currents of disciplinaries and HR procedures. Even admin staff carry the fear that their mistakes will result in them being told to clear their desks.

For anyone facing a disciplinary and losing your job is a terrifying prospect. For Social Workers removal of their registration means they are left to wander the barren wilderness outside the high walls of the profession they worked so hard to enter. A loss of livelihood at the very least. If your mistake has put someone at risk or worse your livelihood will be the least of your concerns. Most people in Social Services take things home with them; We reflect on where we went wrong, where we could have done more, where we failed and usually what we will do better next time. For the condemned, stripped of their previous honours, judged to have been found wanting in the course of their duties, there is no next time. Only regret.

It is of course essential that the professionals who we rely on are up to the job. It is right that those who are unsuitable, reckless, untrustworthy or negligent should be removed from their posts. The great problem however is that in a climate of underfunding it is difficult to see where blame should lie. Should the individual Tommy take the blame for failure to reach their muddy objective, was it their poor handling of their rifle which led to their comrades perishing, or was it the plan devised by the officers that was flawed, poor training, poor equipment or a combination of factors.

It is accepted wisdom that mistakes take place in environments where there is poor leadership, scarcity of resources and high caseloads. When an individual is under pressure they are more likely to make the mistake which costs them their job. Often managers are keen to delegate blame to individuals. To admit a system is at fault is to admit they are at least partly at fault.

In the meantime the fallen are shrouded in secrecy; not to be spoken of. The remaining staff are told not to contact their colleague during proceedings. When a final decision is taken they are told the individual is 'no longer with the authority.' They no longer exist.

Change

2009-08-20T14:52:00.000-07:00

After being told for some time that the long planned changes to the structure of the service, merging 5 Rehab Teams and 5 Locality Teams into 3 'super teams' complete with Community Matrons, would not affect the team we have now been told that the future is more uncertain. In an emergency team meeting we were told we will no longer be dealing with referrals from professionals, these will be made direct to the super teams, leaving us to deal with referrals made by the general public. There has been much discussion in the team since the plans were first announced and it was generally agreed amongst us that, despite the assertions of senior management, like a small boat, we would be inevitably tossed about by the waves generated by the supertanker maneuvering around us.

The plans will be 'going live' in mid-september. Office moves have been scheduled to take place and as everyone settles into new routines of hot-desking and parking problems half of my team will be sent out to help the new teams with processing the new referrals now be dealing with. The future of my team will we are told depend on the statistics generated in this first week.

Throughout the meeting I had a smile on my face. I was recalling when I first started at Social Services. Someone had blu-tacked some cartoons to the office wall, one was the excellent Clare In the Community another had a manager standing in front of an organisational diagram. The diagram had been amended several times, boxes crossed out and new names of teams pencilled in, things like Children's Team 1 was crossed out and Area C written in it's place. The caption of the cartoon was "We've tried re-organising several times so we just thought we'd mess everything up and see what happens" I couldn't help but think of it.

Gender in Social Care

2009-08-18T10:36:00.000-07:00

Jane is dropping dollops of mango chutney on the table after a few too many vodkas, Sheila’s grabbed a fake flower from a vase and is stuffing it down her top. Everyone is having a good laugh. Fairly typical scene of a girls night out. Except there’s one guy. Me. “You are the luckiest man in town” I’m later told by a waiter bringing over my vindaloo. It’s been less than a year since I walked through the door of a Social Services department. I’m at a colleagues leaving do. Conspicuously the only male of the group on the night; one of only two in the whole team in the day. Brought up by my mum, along with two sisters and having spent three years on a sociology degree meant I’m not unfamiliar with being the only male face. In fact I’m comfortable with it. After five years in a boys school in some ways it’s a relief.

A few years later I’m in a car with Steve a locum Occupational Therapist. I’m shadowing him on client visits as he’s waiting for his CRB to come through. This is stupid. He’s probably had several CRBs since my last one which was when I received a permanent contract in 2005, but as he hasn’t yet had one since taking up employment with this authourity he cannot do visits alone. Steve, an ex RAF dog handler, was a welcome sight. I’d just had a period of being the only male in the team. As we head to the visit we’re talking about my experiences as the odd one out. Steve observes that from his experience working in all female environments is “all bitchy” and all male environments are “all Sunday Sport.” While I don’t completely agree with his sentiments I did agree that working in an almost exclusively female environment is a negative thing. Where earlier I had felt comfortable I now felt bitter, alienated and discriminated against.

The Stephen Lawrence enquiry gave birth to the everyday use of the term institutional racism. When we talk about institutional discrimination we talk about discrimination which is hidden in structures, everyday practices and deep down in attitudes we may not be fully aware we have. Quite often when a high profile ‘race-row’ erupts in the media the alleged perpetrators first line of defence is ‘I’m not racist ask any of my friends’. This statement may often be completely true. The difficulty with tackling institutional discrimination like institutional racism is that a person or organisation doesn’t need to be racist to be racist. My experiences, though I hasten to add these are not on the level of some of the racism people have experienced, as the only male in a department has provided me with personal experience of how institutional discrimination exists, even within a Social Services department which prides itself on diversity, in an authority with an ‘equality framework’ backed up by numerous HR policies.

There is the everyday conversation in the office. The discussions about which men my colleagues liked the look of. This could sometimes be fairly innocent of ‘isn’t X or Y nice looking’ or at other times slightly more graphic. I have even had the occasional comment made directly to me. Then there are the conversations involving negative generalisations about men. The out of favour husbands, boyfriends and men-folk in general who were, well, just men after all. ‘No… not you’ would be hastily added if I happened to be nearby. I’ve even heard comments like “typical man” added to discussions in the office when there is a case involving domestic violence.

There is the impact I feel gender has had on my career. I have received feedback from interviews where I have been told while I have knowledge I am ‘too academic’, that I lack communication skills, and the experience of dealing with people. In other words whilst I possess qualities traditionally thought of as masculine I lack the feminine qualities demanded by the field. I would describe myself as academic but I have also spent several years in the field where I have demonstrated an ability to communicate effectively. This may of course just be a case of me reacting to not getting the job, but what makes me feel this is not necessarily the case is that several female colleagues have made the observation that my difficulty progressing in the organisation is ‘because you’re a bloke.’ It’s not however, just men that are on the receiving end of gender stereotypes in the organisation for an overwhelmingly female organisation a very high number of team managers appear to be male.

There is also what I find to be one of the hardest things being the only male in an environment of mainly middle-aged females. No one ever gets your pop-culture or film references.. yeah that’s just like that film.. have you seen it..oh..um you seem to be giving me a strange look. Better get back to typing out this assessment. This can make it hard to form friendships, build good working relationships with colleagues and has at times made me feel excluded and alienated from the team.

Some of these observations may appear trivial, even insignificant. You might feel that I’m ‘touchy’ or take offence too easily. Yet I have never made a complaint. Why? To do so would, I feel have no point. I don’t feel that any of the people I work with are sexist, or even doing anything particularly wrong. I believe however, that many of them operate using a deeply embedded set of assumptions about gender drawn from wider society. These individual assumptions, when joined together, creates an everyday corporate culture which is in opposition to the official projection of an organisation which values diversity. I do not complain about individual colleagues as their actions, in themselves are insignificant. Complaining however, would trigger the organisation into dealing with the issue as an individual one. It will point to its policies that ensure diversity and deflect the blame onto one individual. The complainant is then likely to face consequences such as being regarded with suspicion by colleagues.

This is I believe how discrimination of all kinds and at all levels persists. An organisation needs to be pro-active in placing the minutest of day-to-day practices under the microscope to find where these are infected by prejudice. The problem is that so many organisations are unwilling to do this unless they are faced by external pressure. Otherwise why would an organisation ask such tough questions, questions which may make both managers and the organisation as a whole look bad?

A Turning Point

2009-08-13T14:46:00.000-07:00

Two years ago I applied for an MSc in Social Policy. I deferred for a year as I chose to move into a new flat and did not have enough cash to pay the fees. Over the last year I have been oscillating between going to uni or giving up my place. Decision day would have been the end of August as I would need to give a months notice to be able to begin in October.

Today, after a particularly frustrating morning dealing with a request for an extra toilet in a house as someone might, just might, be using the other one. I suddenly felt trapped. I have sat at the same desk in the same room doing the same job for too many years. I had the urge just to walk out on the spot. Instead I channeled the desire into striking off a couple of things which had to be languishing on my to do list. First I contacted the Uni. Could I pay the fees by installments? Yes I can; Two. One payment in October another in January. Then I sent an email to my manager. As of October I would like to work part time Mon-Wed. I am currently awaiting a decision on this.

Financially it will be a stretch. I will be having a very, very frugal year but, seven years after graduating with a Sociology degree I'm only now within touching distance of 20k a year. Social Care is not a sector which will make you rich! With the interest on my initial student loan still not being covered I desperately need to get something which will propel my career forward. I think the MSc will be what I need.

I have spoken to a few fiends about this. Without a professional qualification it seems very hard to progress your career beyond a couple of rungs up the ladder. It is like trying to gain access to a City without using a main road. There are back roads into the city but you need to have good local knowledge or a guide to navigate them. You're also likely to become stuck in a traffic jam as
everyone without a qualification is seeking the same route. A professional qualification on the other hand allows you fast, direct access into the heart of the city.

Fair Pay?

2009-08-10T16:53:00.000-07:00

In my mail today, along with a bank statement which was more gory than Quentin Tarantino's innermost thoughts, arrived a ballot paper from Unison. We in the public sector must decide whether to accept a pay offer of 1.25% for the lowest paid grades and 1.00% for all other grades.

Even with the latest CPI inflation at a low 1.8% this represents a pay cut for the whole public sector. If we reject the offer this may eventually result in strike action. I have been involved with strike action before and feel it has been unsuccessful. As soon as the news breaks that we are to strike the politicians aided by some sections of the media reach into the box marked 'lazy stereotypes' and pull forth a cardboard cut out of a fictionalised public sector employee. Favourites being the paper pushing beauracrat; only too happy to stand in the way of your planning application, council tax payment or request for residential care for your mother-in-law. This creature exists only in the public sector as it is a virus which cannot exist outside it's environment for long. Dying on exposure to the dog-eat-dog hard faced 'real world' occupied by the rest of society. The other perennial stereotype is the 'non-job'. Often associated with that other demon of the public sector political correcness or 'elf and safety'. Playground Supervisors, Cycling Officers et al all on 'taxpayer funded' saleries starting at £25k a year and all doing jobs which are totally pointless.

As a public sector employee I will say that there are some job roles which are overpaid (usually with coordinator in the title) whose purpose can be questionable. Where these exist they are in part down to the vagaries of the grading system. Job roles across an authourity are compared using a set of criteria and banded into grades. The criteria for a band will include things like whether there are visits to the public, supervision of other employees, etc. Taken across a whole authourity this can overvalue some jobs, but it can often undervalue others. For example a Childrens Social Worker has the same starting salary as an Adult Services Social Worker, yet one job is seen within the profession as much tougher than the other. Consequently Childrens Service departments often find themselves understaffed. This grading system means that unlike the private sector pay cannot be deemed simply by a market driven supply and demand value. If it were Childrens Social Workers would be one of the highest paid workers in the Authourity, rather than being equal to Adults Social Workers, Town Planners and, Painters and Decorators.

Not many people find great wealth serving in the public sector. This is not because, as many would have it, they would not cope in the 'real world', but because they beleive in what they do and are trying their best to make a difference. For all the talk of 'paper pushers' and 'non-jobs' the public sector is full of dedicated staff who are underpaid and often battling to do essential jobs to the best of their ability to a backdrop of declining resources. It is not uncommon to hear stories of staff routinely going without breaks and working 5 hours overtime in one day just to get the job done and putting up with spectacular amounts of abuse from joe public. Of course our detractors will say this is all comon to the private sector too, but no-one is accusing them of having a free ride. For all the dedication I see everyday I think my colleagues deserve more than 1%.

Welcome to Going Public.

2009-08-10T16:37:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my Blog. When I was at university, in my room adorned with a Che Guevara poster, I dreamed of making a difference in the public sector. Not for me the huge profits of the fat cat private sector world. Why then, almost five years after I first timidly set foot in the council offices as an employee, am I so dissilusioned?

I've been inspired to start this blog by the other public employees who have written about their experiences. People like Nightjack. Maybe no one will read it but I hope, like all those years ago, that I can finally make a difference, if only to make people ask the questions which so badly need to be asked of the public sector today.

I work in an Adult Services department of a Local Authourity in England. In my five years, starting at the very bottom rung of the ladder, I have worked in three roles under two administrations and four different managers. I am currently working two roles, of which I will talk about more in future posts; Provided I last that long. I'm already thinking about my exit strategy but my colleagues have heard that many times before.

I will in these posts use alternative identities and will not name my employers. I will not publish any information which can lead to the identification of individuals. I will however, discuss the issues as I see them, the problems I encounter every day in my job and my views on the governments policy. I hope you enjoy reading them and please feel free to post any comments I am more than happy to correspond about the issues affecting the public sector.