The Colwell Inquiry had established early on that it was prepared to criticise ‘the contemporary standard’ of social work practice where it offended against ‘ordinary standards of social or moral concern’ or went ‘against accepted tenets of commonsense’ (DHSS, 1974a, p 45) (see p 115). Far from being an established profession that might have regarded any such criticism as an affront, on principle, we have argued in Chapter Three that social work, neither in function nor administrative form, was in any sense established within the contemporary welfare state of the early 1970s. Nonetheless, within social services departments, despite the bureaucratic frustrations and ever-increasing demands, there was at least a sense of forward momentum. Those who expressed some regret ‘that something had been lost’ (see p 63) in the post-Seebohm world appeared in the minority, as the discussion had turned decisively to focus on what social work could and should be in the future, both as an occupation and as an institutionalised form of welfare practice.

Those discussions were very largely taking place, however, within the narrow confines of the town hall, the profession and its trade press. Neither the popular press nor the wider public had taken very much notice of the rushed legislation at the end of the most recent Parliament, and other than in relation to the advertising of changes to local services, the implementation of the Local Authority Social Services Act 1970 may have appeared to be very little more than an administrative reform, even as the name suggests. Outside the new social services departments, others may have retained a much older conception of what social work was and what it should be than even Eileen Younghusband had described, let alone Frederic Seebohm. The Colwell Inquiry would provide an opportunity for a much wider audience to see and to judge ‘the contemporary standard of practice’ in the light not only of their own ‘common sense’ but also in the light of their own experiences, many of which would have been formed, as we have suggested, in the pre-welfare state Britain of less than 25 years previously. For others, of course, that pre-1948 experience offered a prelapsarian prospect, not back to the past but onto the future and new designs for the provision of services for those who seemed unwilling or unable to look after themselves.