Introduction

In the history of children's services a small number of Acts of Parliament can be identified as important exemplars of the dominant social and political eras within which they were framed. The 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, the 1948 Children Act and the 1989 Children Act might all be seen as such signposts, as, more recently, can the 2017 Children and Social Work Act. In spite of the deficits that can be identified in the implementation of the 1989 Act, it stands in stark contrast to the patchwork of children's social services legislation across the preceding four decades and, indeed, since, with respect to broader child and family welfare provisions. It incorporates a clear vision for the delivery of child and family social work services, and of the nature of professional child and family social work. Thirty years on, although housing, health, education and social security Bills have come and gone, the 1989 Act remains barely changed. Moreover, it has consistently had an unusually high and very positive profile both in the child care policy literature and in the hearts and minds of social workers, past and present. Accounts of opposition to recent proposals to undermine it, as in the defeated ‘exemption clauses’ in the 2017 Children and Social Work Bill, describe it as ‘carefully crafted’ (Jones, 2019, p 55) and emphasise its evidence-informed design and implementation: ‘the Act had an unusually empirical gestation period’ (Tunstill and Willow, 2017, p 44). The Bill was, after all, first introduced in the House of Lords in the previous year by the Lord Chancellor as:

That is not to say that everything about its original design or likely implementation process was ever seen as entirely unproblematic.