Sarah Banks’ article on reclaiming social work ethics and challenging the new public management has strong resonance for me. I share many of her perceptions of our current situation, what is important for a radical ethics, and how social justice positions which encompass difference and the political ethics of care positions may be combined to form a critical situated and political ethics for social workers.

In this response I give my interpretation of the major arguments about ethics that Sarah Banks is proposing for the social work community, and I indicate where I support her positions and where I disagree. Since I am in agreement with much of what Banks is proposing, I see the major contribution that I can make to taking forward some of her arguments as augmenting her views by proposing some alternative perspectives. This will, I hope, serve to deepen the conversation which the lead essay in this edited collection has started. I am particularly interested in Banks’ propositions on what may constitute a progressive ethics, and her calls for a reclaiming of the meaning of ethics from the neoliberal position which has appropriated it for its own purposes, and I make some additional suggestions for doing so.

I agree with Banks that ethics in social work has become even more pertinent since the rise of austerity measures and the neoliberal policies, and with Iain Ferguson (2008) that it is worrisome that there is increasing managerialism and marketisation with negative consequences for social work. In an age of audit culture, Banks is quite right when she observes that social workers are increasingly called upon to monitor and evaluate their clients rather than offer them assistance.

Banks alludes to the effects of increasing marketisation, with growing privatisation and the promotion of free markets, resulting in the concentration of power and wealth centrally and in the hands of a few. She also describes how new public management (NPM), characterised by fiscal conservatism, cost efficiency, competitiveness and measurable outputs and throughputs, affected social work in the UK and other Northern countries. She also observes that NPM is changing over time in the light of new public austerity (NPA).