Re-shaping the Community - How We Need To Go Back To Council Basics

If we could see exactly how our councils are run and the amount of work many employees of social services are under perhaps we would sympathise with these workers alot more. There are a great many stories leaking here, there and everywhere from each corner of the UK (and the rest of the world sometimes) on yet another child or vulnerable adult lying victim at the seeming hands of our social services network, yet are they really to blame? Well, there are, as with many social issues, two schools of thought - one would argue on one hand that they are fully to blame and should be held countable for every injustice in our community which could have possibly been avoided. On the other hand, there is the camp which, like me, are full of employees and former employees who understand fully the extent of the work which needs to be carried out to ensure the safety and security of every service user it encounters. Who is right? We blame, as a matter of human nature, the very thing we either cannot see nor understand....

Featured on the Community Care.co.uk website this week was an update written by Mithran Samuel, on the recent Vale of Glamorgan case which saw the unwise placement of a teenage sex offender with a family including two young children which he systematically abused. We would guess, rather wisely it would see, that the council placement team/policy is to blame, and we would be right, but are they really to blame, or is it resting firmly on the shoulders of a objective system which is long passed an overhaul - a system which, cannot be changed or revoked by anyone....not even in a case like this...

Mithran writes,

"Vale of Glamorgan Council will face an inspection after failings were identified in its handling of the case of a teenage sex offender who was placed with a family, whose children he went on to abuse. Welsh government deputy minister for social services Gwenda Thomas said today that the Care and Social Services Inspectorate Wales would undertake a review of the authority later in the year, with a particular focus on the issues raised by the case..."

"She was responding to a damning internal inquiry into the case by the council, published in May, which found that the council's leaving care team had failed to provide the adult placement service, which made the placement, with a chronology of his past offences or the results of risk assessments made on him...."

It is in this second paragraph where we find the problem: The system put in place here failed to the very service which would have stopped this placement happening, thus saving the mental and physical anguish of these poor children. No one to blame here - only a policy which doesn't and could never work.

The problem which our local governments today is the very system on which they are based. A vast majority of the time, they are ancient Establishments run by equally old fashioned councillors who have no true concept of the world in which their communities live. Any council department is run by it's sheer volume of paperwork. Everything is done like clockwork, despite the fact that a policy is outdated, the system in question will still go ahead simply because it exists within the council structure. So why aren't these policies examined and re-written? Because, like many other public sector authorities, something has to happen first before the system is reworked. Through the NHS, someone usually has to die before the way in which that person has died comes into clearer focus. Through social services, teams gather on a regular basis in huddled corners of council buildings and drum out in succession each and every case in which someone has fallen victim to a system or a policy and where justice needs to be sort. These people earn a lot of money simply attending meetings about a system that fails. More frighteningly enough it is through these systems that simple procedures and even diabolically bad human judgement has played a major role in the demise of an innocent person.

We look to the future in this business and wonder where on Earth to start. Being a former pen pusher myself, I had witnessed enough though almost two decades which I found both staggering and frightening. Not only because these events were taking place but there were huge teams of people who's job was solely to sort out the mess which was usually left behind as a result of a dusty and out of date system.

IF and this is a big if, any one person is to be blamed for these tragic stories which fill our already over spilling negative thoughts about our local councils, it is the very person or people who wrote these policies and systems in the first place. The real tragedy here is that these people are long gone - either off the mortal coil themselves or simply moved on into other professions. Council employees are not paid to judge what has already been judged. They are not paid to have an opinion and if they do, they are not paid to speak ill of it. Many social workers will say that they are far too pressured and over worked to think too heavily about how their system works or fails for that matter. If we really want to change the way we care for our vulnerable society, we need to re-write every single policy and regulation in the book. I wonder if the job is not necessarily too big but too worrying, as you could not imagine what would be unearthed....

Michelle Duffy 2009

The article mentioned here was taken from:

http://www.communitycare.co.uk/Articles/2009/07/08/112055/vale-of-glamorgan-faces-inspection-on-back-of-abuse.html

Just as a final note on the subject the article mentioned states...

"Following the report, director of social services Phil Evans announced a major retraining programme for staff and an overhaul of risk management and case referral processes. Three members of staff were suspended, prompting Unison to accuse the authority of scapegoating social workers....."

I wonder when we will see the day when all social workers are given the support they need so they can do their job effectively, and above all, save lives.....