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three - The state of social work

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2022

Ian Butler  and
Mark Drakeford
Ian Butler
Affiliation:
University of Bath
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Summary

This ‘right to know’ was listed by Frederic Seebohm as a persistent example of a series of what he considered to be the social ills of his time. In a speech he made at the London branch of BASW in 1977, commenting on the fate of the report he had written in 1968, The report of the Committee on Local Authority and Allied Personal Social Services, he said:

I am still fascinated by the complex nature of society and regret that we have not got further than we have in understanding the basic causes of distress, nor found any simple answers to the problem of developing a happy and contented community, nor of stemming the increase in violence and other demonstrations of a basic frustration shown by so many, even though they may be a small but very audible minority. In industry and commerce there is an ever growing demand to participate at all levels and an evident “passion to know” or at least to obtain an assurance that there is “nothing to know”. (Seebohm, 1977)

Seebohm's remarks are of interest not simply because they follow the popular emotional currents that flowed around the death of Maria Colwell, but because Seebohm could claim to have designed the structure of social services that was judged to have failed her and it is to that which we now turn.

Before Seebohm

At least some of the ‘frustration, anxiety and stress’ facing social workers in the early part of 1973 (see Chapter One, this volume) arose out of the major structural changes that had been introduced by the Local Authority Social Services Act 1970. To a degree that remains contested, this Act gave legislative substance to The report of the Committee on Local Authority and Allied Personal Social Services that had been presented to Parliament in July 1968 (the ‘Seebohm Report’).

In short, Seebohm recommended that out of the plethora of existing arrangements to deliver welfare services at municipal level, there should be created (Seebohm, 1968, para 2):

… a new local author ity department, providing a community based and family orientated service, which will be available to all.

Type
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Social Work on Trial
The Colwell Inquiry and the State of Welfare
 , pp. 59 - 90
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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