Introduction

The reform of the personal social services in the UK since the 1970s has followed a clear long-term trajectory. This has led away from the model of services based in a single local authority agency and dominated by a single profession. But the logic for the fragmentation of that agency and that profession, and their recoalescence as parts of other services has been tortuous. This chapter attempts to trace the various ideas and models that have contributed to reforms, and how they have patterned the present outcomes.

The creation of the local authority social services departments in the 1970s owed much to a particular perception of the common needs of certain marginal groups. Large numbers of elderly, disabled, chronically ill and disadvantaged people, and many children and their parents, were seen as calling for a kind of mediation and special attention. They were perceived as needing services to bridge with the major pillars of the welfare state – social security, health, education and housing – and to supply a form of personal response to their subjective experiences and particular requirements. And social workers were thought to have a distinctive range of skills and commitments appropriate for these tasks.

None of these assumptions now holds good. The new logic of reform distinguishes strongly between a number of different roles – market broker, community activator, risk assessor and protector – as well as identifying quite separate needs of the various groups. It delegates the tasks to interdisciplinary teams in which social workers tend to play subordinate parts (although medicine, nursing, psychology and occupational therapy now borrow from the range of skills once thought to be the province of social work). And it derives its rationales from a whole set of diverse principles – the ‘choice agenda’, ‘rights and responsibilities’, ‘value for money’, ‘opportunities for all’, ‘social inclusion’ and ‘tough love’, as well as from specific ‘crises’ (such as street crime or asylum seeking).

All this has reminded us about a fundamental fact in the history of the personal social services – albeit one briefly challenged in the early 1970s (Titmuss, 1974, chapter 9). In essence these have always been residual elements in social policy.