Oxford - more evidence social work is not accountable

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Inevitably the finger will point at those in high authority (and this is always right - if you doubt this read Lord Carrington's letter) but there is, for me, a much deeper malaise in social services. Perhaps it relates to the way in which social workers are taught or trained - my feeling is that the left wing sociology dominating social work courses, a sort of Heinz Kiosk "we are all guilty" approach, has contributed. But there's no doubt we have a problem and the Serious Case Review into grooming and abuse in Oxford reminds us (it should also remind us that the problem isn't party political - Oxfordshire has a Tory leadership after all):

Blyth said that from 2005-10 there was sufficient knowledge about the girls, drugs and prostitution and their association with adult men to have generated a rigorous and strategic response from police and social workers.

This knowledge included many “worrying” warning signs over a number of years involving more than one girl, multiple alleged perpetrators, who were usually Pakistani, and a strong association with children in care. But this was not passed on to the highest levels of management or acted upon until 2011, when police and social services finally started to piece together the organised grooming and sexual exploitation.

So for perhaps as long as six years, social workers in Oxford simply allowed what was happening to carry on. The abuse was in front of their eyes but was not seen as a problem worth reporting to senior management.  This may be true but it must raise serious questions about supervision, management and appraisal within Oxfordshire social services. And at the heart of this is a culture that - as the report makes clear - tolerated under age sex and seemed not to understand that, in UK law, having sex with a minor is always a crime.

However, the fundamental problem here is that authorities simply believed there was nothing that either could - or in some cases even needed to - be done:

The fact that scores of professionals from numerous disciplines, and tens of organisations or departments, took a long time to recognise CSE, used language that appeared at least in part to blame victims and see them as adults, and had a view that little could be done in the face of ‘no cooperation’ demonstrates that the failures were common to organisational systems.

The shock of the public at failings of this sort has begun to change how local authorities view child sexual exploitation and, in particular, the situation where that exploitation involved girls in their mid-teens. Every example of street grooming throws up the same limitations - girls making complaints then withdrawing them, other girls denying there's any problem and the police or social services not following through where they know the situation is exploitative.

In the end (which is the point Lord Carrington made) accountability is absolute. But this means that political leadership in social services needs to be clear - it isn't because successive national governments and the social work profession has undermined it - and prepared to challenge the decision-making of professionals. I don't think, for example, that the leadership of Oxfordshire County Council would consider underage sex as something to be tolerated, to be understood, yet that is precisely the view taken by those acting on that leadership's authority.

The problem in the police is less clear. The move to Police and Crime Commissioners should act in time to make accountability clearer but the situation remains that the police are simply not accountable - in corporate terms - for their operation decisions. We have seen local councillors in Rotherham resigning. Senior council officers resigning. The elected police and crime commissioners for South Yorkshire (eventually) resigned. Yet not one senior police officer in the South Yorkshire force has gone despite so many of the poor decisions and service failures landing at that force's door.

This situation is a reminder of what you get - and let this be a warning to NHS campaigners - when you allow public services to operate without effective political scrutiny. Yet this is the reality across many of our locally delivered services - there is either no realistic scrutiny or else (as with response to child sexual exploitation) scrutiny is simply not possible or even allowed.

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The culture of social work (and the arrogance of the law).

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None of us know the whole truth about the tragic case of the woman forced into a caesarian only to have her baby taken into care and put up for adoption. We will have seen the original story, the related comments from Christopher Booker and John Hemmings MP, assorted clarifications from within the system including Essex County Council and a selection of writings from legal bloggers explaining why those criticising the system are wrong (or even suggesting, without evidence, that the facts are so very different from those printed in the newspapers). Plus latterly the interviews with the woman herself.

Because I don't know the whole truth, if I comment as a non-professional (i.e. not a child protection social worker or a specialist lawyer) then what I say can - and will be - simply dismissed by the system's defenders. Indeed, the easiest option for such defenders of the system is to attack the writer's credibility. You know how this turns out when the author (who is no more able to assess the "facts" than others but believes, also without evidence, that they are more able in this regard) starts with this sort of line:

So who are Christopher Booker and John Hemming?

This is followed by criticism based on unconnected matters (Booker's views on climate change, for example) and selective quotations from cases where either Booker or Hemming - or both - had been involved or had made comment. This isn't to say that Booker or Hemming are right or wrong but to observe that using anecdote (and a selected quote, albeit from a judge, is just anecdote) to destroy credibility is a classic tactic in ad hominem attacks.

The problem here is that the writer in question is, for all his attempts at being right-on, essentially an insider to the system - a government lawyer:

I’m a barrister, and worked as a government lawyer for twelve years, advising ministers and government departments on a wide range of public law issues from tax to terrorism, from freedom of information to pensions, from discrimination to health and from defence to broadcasting. My career in government included stints at the Cabinet Office, where I advised on the EU Constitution negotiations, and at the Attorney General’s Office where I advised Lord Goldsmith on a wide variety of legal issues. I have advised nearly every government department, from the Home Office to Health and from the Treasury to the MoD.

I note with interest that the author is emphatically not a specialist in family law, social work or issues relating to mental health. Rather he is concerned to defend the system whereby social services, health and the courts were able (again whether this is right is not the question) to force a woman into a caesarian section, take her child into care and subsequently put that child up for adoption.  And when journalists, MPs or other lay people challenge or question the system it is imperative that it is defended - and especially that the cultural assumptions of, in this case, social work are not opened up for examination.

I've written before about the ideology of social work - the assumption of societal guilt, non-judgementalism and rejection of heterodox, or seemingly hetrodox, choices - but here it is the culture that is more important. In one respect this is a culture of self-protection, closing ranks and hiding in process and paper trails - things that are not surprising in a large bureaucratic organisation of any sort (and child protection systems such as closed courts make this much easier). However, there is a broader cultural factor - social work, like the law and medicine, presumes that only it is qualified to decide on a course of action and that any options from non-professionals are quite simply wrong.

Moreover, the culture is reinforced by the very familiar form of words in response to enquiries about specific cases: "(name of organisation - usually a local council) does not comment on individual cases". Thus the organisation can plead protection of privacy (for the subject of a case) in order to prevent any questioning of its decision-making. Indeed, in nearly all child protection cases, the actual decision-making process is not subject to any lay scrutiny and the secrecy of the courts inevitably leads to problems for reporters - such as Christopher Booker - in reporting concerns.

Even where there is a formal opportunity for lay enquiry within the system (such as is afforded to me as a local councillor), we are strongly advised that our remit is with the proper administration of the system not with the decision taken. A councillor is able to question whether the council has conducted the process correctly (and there are routes for action if this is not so) but, in essence, if the paperwork is correct, we are unable to challenge the basis of the decision.

Finally, the system of non-identification is used to protect the names of the decision-makers as well as the names of social services clients. This makes it more difficult to have adequate lay scrutiny at a departmental level and provides a strong incentive and opportunity to cover-up. Here in Bradford, the full Hamzah Khan serious case review is so redacted as to provide little practical value to us as councillors. We are forced to rely on the report summary  - and the assumptions it inevitably makes - rather than have the ability to review the actual data upon which that summary is based.

It may be (although I doubt it) that the actions taken in the Essex case were the only reasonable options available to the Council and other agencies. But so long as we cannot know (and 'we' does not have to mean full disclosure to the public merely disclosure to individuals or organisations that are not instruments in the decision-making itself), there will remain doubts about why certain decisions are made, the professional ideology of the decision-makers and the secretive organisational culture that engulfs social work.

Perhaps, rather than engage in ad hominem attacks on those struggling to expose possible flaws in our care systems, great legal minds - the full arrogance of the law - would be better directed to finding ways of allowing proper scrutiny of social services' decision-making and the operation of the family courts without unduly compromising the necessary protection of client identities.

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The ideology of social work: "we are all guilty"

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Michael Wharton, in his guise as Peter Simple, so often found his satire cropping up in real life. So it is with the mantra of Keinz Kiosk, psychologist -  "we are all guilty" he would cry as the audience stampeded for the exits. However, this collective sin sits at the heart of much soft left thinking and damages society in being so.

At a time here in Bradford when we must look to our practice and policies around child protection for all the wrong reasons, the idea that there is nothing wrong with the training, management and development of social workers must be challenged. So I am cheered when Michael Gove, as the responsible minister says:

"In too many cases, social work training involves idealistic students being told that the individuals with whom they will work have been disempowered by society. They will be encouraged to see these individuals as victims of social injustice whose fate is overwhelmingly decreed by the economic forces and inherent inequalities which scar our society."

This isn't to deny inequality or to say that the inconsistency of our education system doesn't result in inadequate parents. It is to change the focus away from the idea that social workers should not judge the actions of their clients.

As the health and achievement of many families demonstrates being poor simply isn't a precursor to dysfunction. However, we have rather got use to the idea of using poverty as an excuse or explanation for dysfunction. For all that each tragic child protection case is different, recent cases have a depressing similarity - not simply the presence of broken families, drugs and alcohol but the apparent failing of seeing a starving child and assuming poverty rather than neglect or abuse.

We are not all guilty, people are not poor because others are rich and Britain is a generous nation - collectively and individually. So when social workers see that starving child, they should perhaps ask themselves whether the fault lies with a neglectful parent rather than an unequal society.

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Is it ideology or bureaucracy? On the failings of social work.

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Douglas Carswell points out the cruel truth about the Daniel Pelka case:

The boxes were ticked. Training was complied with. Meetings were held. Meanwhile a little boy went hungry and his injuries grew worse. Officialdom's culture of compliance produced only inertia and incompetence. This should make us alarmed and very, very angry.

The suggestion here is that bureaucracy - Kafka's castle - was to blame for the lack of intervention. But why when:

Since the 2007 killing of Baby P, there has been a huge surge in the number of youngsters being removed from their families by social workers.

The children’s court advisory service dealt with 10,199 cases between April 2011 and March 2012 – a near-doubling of the numbers in just four years. 

It is almost impossible to believe that, in this world of heightened awareness, authorities didn't think to intervene, merely to jot down details of the child's distress in their notes.

With each case we see the same explanations and excuses, the same sophistry as social workers fail to explain why they pursue some parents to the ends of the earth - parents who are less of a threat than were the parents of this poor child.

And why are councillors - me included - so complacent or reluctant to ask the hard questions of our social services management?  Can we really be content, given that we haven't asked the questions, that everything is fine? Or are we nibbling at out nails muttering "there but for the grace of god"?

The problem isn't simply bureaucracy - that is just a reflection of the problem. The real concern is the ideology of social work, the faux non-judgemental approach, the obsession with 'cultural sensitivities' and the view (unsupported by evidence) that there are no demographic or social factors that influence child abuse or neglect. This isn't true and social workers - as well as the ideologues who define social work practice - know it isn't true.

Like so many areas ruled by experts, social work (and the parasitic growths of lawyers and such that attach to the business) has become impenetrable - the verbiage of the profession excludes anyone seeking to understand, the sophistry of the professionals' defence is iron clad in its certainty and the elimination of challenge is now so sophisticated that it is impossible for us charged with being "corporate parents" to exercise that role in any way beyond the guided tweeness allowed by social workers.

Right now we take too many children into care yet allow children like Daniel Pelka to remain in terrible circumstances. Right now social services leaders prefer to blame the problem on government, "the cuts" or "austerity" rather than explore why they are failing.And when those unfortunates arrive in care, we fail them again  - as a momentary glance at educational performance, crime and the tragedy of grooming would tell us.

Perhaps we need to start behaving like parents - interfering, judging, worrying, badgering and annoying. Getting in the face of those we care fore - not because we don't like them but because that's what parental love is about.

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It's not care, it's neglect...

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So we take a child "into care". Most often this is quite right and proper (although the secrecy behind the process makes it more-or-less impossible to know which taking of a child is good and which egregious) but then we put many of these youngsters in homes.

And quite frankly, three square meals aside, that's not much of an improvement:

The NSPCC has warned that children in residential homes are three times more likely to go missing than other youngsters as figures revealed that nearly 3,000 children repeatedly disappeared from care last year. 

I'm sure that these are 3,000 differently tragic cases and that social workers are struggling under a mountain of paperwork and an avalanche of stupid rules - not to mention ideas such as being "non-judgemental" that damn children to not knowing what is good or bad behaviour. But yet again it indicates just how poor our care system has become as a result of the laissez faire parenting approach mandated by the law and by the ideology of social work.

But this doesn't excuse the person in charge of Bradford system saying this:

“Some of the ‘missing reports’ are in relation to young people staying out overnight – something that all teenagers can be prone to.” 

Did your children ever stay out overnight without you knowing where they were, who they were with and that there were responsible adults present?

This attitude entirely sums up why we have a problem - it is not care, it is neglect.

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A thought on Council budgets and social services...

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Councils spend a lot of money - £1.3 billion in Bradford's case - but the bit that matters is the "net revenue budget". This is the bit that remains after we take account of fees and charges, remove money that is simply passed through the books (e.g. the money that goes to schools) and adjust for things we do on behalf of government like pay benefits.

In Bradford this figure is £425.9 million of which 38% comes from the Council Tax with the remainder (bar around £6 million taken from reserves) coming from central government grants. Between friends we can call this a 40/60 split. And, assuming the finance director's guesses are more-or-less right, future reductions in grant will mean that this split will be approaching 50/50.

Which brings an interesting observation - the Council's spending on what we used to call social services (children's services and adult social care) is now some £203.3 million. This is around 48% of the net revenue budget. In simple terms, the grants we receive from government pay for social services.

All this rather begs a question - since there is a national debate around adult care and a move from council commissioned block grants to personalised, individual purchase, there is little justification for this being seen as a necessary council service. The private and voluntary sector are more than capable - as is the case with housing - of making this provision. Local government is superfluous except perhaps as a quality regulator (much better and fairer when the council is not also a major provider).

Children's services remain a problem but, given the nature of these services and the limited scope for any meaningful councillor input, there is perhaps an argument - I would need convincing - for child protection and services to be run by a government agency. Service provision - children's homes, adoption and fostering services and so forth - could be commissioned (perhaps from the big children's charities).

If this were the case then nearly 100% of Bradford Council's funding would be raised locally.

It's thought...


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How Labour failed working people (the short version)

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For years I’ve argued that our approach to regeneration and social change amounts to little more than sending middle class folk into poor communities to say: “there, there” and to give them a big hug. Nothing about the underlying dysfunction, the depression, the dreary inevitability of poverty.

To me this was the promise of the Labour Party and their acolytes in the social work industry. They would promote governments founded on high levels of taxation and these taxes would be used to “alleviate poverty”. But sadly the only poverty alleviated by this process was that of middle-class lefty graduates too right-on to get a real job earning money that might really alleviate poverty.

So when Tracey Cheetham (that rare thing, a nice socialist) talks about poverty my ears prick, my eyes glisten and I see the true advocate of the left-wing myth. Poverty isn’t eliminated by taxing rich folk. It really isn’t. And it’s worse when those tax pounds are, in reality, merely transferred from the moderately well-off to the averagely well-off. Two thirds of that “investment” in defeating poverty goes in wages. Wages mostly paid to people who don’t live in the deprived communities that those folk are employed to hug.

I am (as merits a good conservative) sceptical about the magic bullet of family policy. But I can read the evidence. I can see that when we give perverse incentives that encourage single parenthood we are doing something wrong. And I can see that working class communities don’t want collegiate guff about engagement and participation. They want the government to pay up on its side of the bargain – that the working class do all the shit jobs, the one’s you lot are all too precious to do. And you – the government – will make sure our kids don’t have to go through all that by providing a half way decent education, some good health care and a chance at reaching those Elysian uplands.

Dear Labour Party, this was your deal, your offer, your Faustian pact with the ordinary worker. And you reneged on that deal. You bottled it. You failed. Instead of hard work leading to opportunity it led to the benefit trap, to the dole queue, to sink schools, to a depressed and depressing world of drugs, booze and fast food. And your response was to feed the articulate middle class social workers who claimed a solution. And that solution wasn’t jobs. Or education. Or opportunity. It was a lecture about drinking, smoking, fatty foods and slapping kids. At best it was a hug.

Were I one of these victims of Labour’s arrogance, I would be hoping – with every sinew – that things will change and the nanny state is replaced with real opportunity, choice and the fulfilment of that promise of a better future. And they won’t get that from a Labour Government.