If social work had been on trial during the Colwell Inquiry, the final verdict on the profession was to be delivered elsewhere and much later. In this chapter, we describe the immediate and medium-term consequences of the Maria Colwell Inquiry and begin to consider the influence it had, ephemeral and lasting, on social work in particular and the welfare state more generally. We begin with the production of the Inquiry report itself, and its immediate reception in Whitehall, focusing on the struggle that went on inside government to craft a response to the recommendations made by the Inquiry team. We then turn to the micro-processes of government as it drew together a series of administrative and procedural reforms that Colwell implied and that did so much to shape the future of social work both organisationally and professionally. Finally, we deal with the major legislative consequence of the Colwell case, the Children Act 1975, exploring the ways in which the major preoccupations of the last three chapters were pursued and resolved in the complexities of law making.

The Colwell Inquiry report

The most immediate outcome of any inquiry is, of course, the report that it produces. But in the same way as the proceedings of the Maria Colwell Inquiry were an emotional, intensely human activity, so too was the writing of its report. The only direct source that we have for its production comes from Olive Stevenson and we should recognise that, as author of the minority view, hers is, inevitably, a partial account.

Although dissenting from the interpretation advanced by her colleagues at critical points, Olive Stevenson was clear that a ‘really good chronology’ was a fundamental necessity ‘if you are going to be fair to the parties’, and that provided in the report was one with which Miss Stevenson was generally content. She herself wrote the agreed and uncontested section on interagency and interprofessional work (see DHSS, 1974a, chapter three), the element of the report, which, in her view, ‘in the longer run has been the most important’. In the remainder of the agreed text, her struggle with the chair was, she said, ‘to curb the excesses of his purple prose’; to avoid phrases included, as she thought, simply to provide headlines in newspaper reports.