by Ray Jones
This article on social work in the 1980s is the second in a five-part series by Professor Ray Jones for Community Care's 50th anniversary. Each part will look back at key events from the previous five decades - starting with the 1970s - that have shaped the social work sector today.The 1970s saw the creation of a unified generic profession of social work and integrated social services within local authorities.
The 1980s was the start of a sea change with - as tracked by Community Care - the beginning of the separation between services for children and adults and increasing specialisation among practitioners.
It was two major reviews, conducted in the mid-1980s, that both led to the initial fragmentation of social services and cemented local government as having the key responsibility for them.
The first was undertaken by the Law Commission and looked at the legislation for children’s social care. It was seen as potentially consolidating the piecemeal legislative changes of the past 40 years and, as such, was largely undertaken under the political radar.
The Children Act 1989
The Law Commission review culminated in the Children Act 1989. This is still the legislative bedrock of both public and private family court proceedings and social work practice with children and families. It established the primacy of helping families with children in need and working in partnership with parents, and across agency boundaries, whilst also protecting and caring for children when necessary.
So how did an act which cemented local government’s role in leading and providing children’s social services emerge when public services were being castigated by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government? Two reflections.
There was the significant impact of individuals who both shaped the legislation and stayed committed and active in delivering it. These included Rupert Hughes, who was the lead civil servant for children’s services throughout the 1980s.
A valuable lesson here is the importance of people in key positions who stick to the task of creating and delivering change. This contrasts with the churn and change of children’s ministers over recent years.
Another lesson is that sometimes it’s best to act under the radar and to push forward an agenda without too much attention. Children’s legislation would not have been a political priority for Thatcher – so it was best not to give it much of a profile when the consequence of doing so might have been opposition from number 10.
The NHS and Community Care Act 1990
The same was not so for the second major social services reform resulting from a 1980s review.In 1987, Sir Roy Griffiths, deputy chairman of Sainsbury plc, was asked by Thatcher to undertake a review of community care for adults.
As with children’s services, previous decades had seen significant changes in policy and practice for people needing help and care. Prompted in part by scandals about abuse in long-stay hospitals, there had been a thrust to provide more services within communities, especially domiciliary care within people’s own homes.
Supported by research and also by a report from the Audit Commission, the life benefits of care within communities were increasingly recognised. Griffiths was tasked with making this more of a reality.
His 1988 report, Community Care: Agenda for Action, recommended transferring the money increasingly being spent on care homes from the social security budget to local authorities. This would allow them to strategically plan local services to provide help and care for younger and older disabled people within their communities.
Thatcher was not enamoured with the proposal to give more money and responsibility to local government.
More politically acceptable was Griffiths’ recommendation that local authorities should not be the providers of community care services but the commissioners, purchasing care from the growing private sector. Within this context, social workers were to be ‘care managers’, assessing need and, after discussion with service users, buying services from the care ‘market’.
What made Griffiths’ proposals politically attractive was not only that they promoted a privatised market, but that they presented a mechanism for capping and controlling the rights-based growth in social security expenditure on care.
Local authorities were tasked with containing community care costs within capped budgets. This was cemented in the National Health Service and Community Care Act 1990, and the resulting rationing persists to this day.
The legacy of the two acts
The two acts have taken social services and social work practice in two different directions. Social services departments created separate divisions for children’s and adults’ services whose social workers worked separately from each other.The extensive policy and practice guidance the government issued in relation to each act also resulted in more specialisation, both between and within children’s and adults’ services. It was a major move away from the previously generic community social work towards separate and specialised services, which became less local and community-based.
The separation of children’s and adults' services within social services departments was taken further with the 2004 Children Act, which led to the demise of those departments in England. That act required councils to bring children’s social care together with education in what are the children’s services departments that exist today, in separation from adult social services.
So it was the 1980s that planted the seeds for the separation and specialisation of the present day. It is its legacy that has social workers and leaders seeking to bridge the divides that have been created.
Ray Jones is the author of ‘A History of the Personal Social Services in England: Feast, Famine and the Future’ (Palgrave Macmillan 2020) and recently undertook the Independent Review of Northern Ireland’s Children’s Social Care Services.
