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Many disabled people are facing benefit cuts in a government plan to save over £5bn a year by 2029-30 and get more people with health conditions into work, announced yesterday.

Access to personal independence payment (PIP) – the main disability benefit for people of working-age – would be restricted, while incapacity benefit rates for those out of work would be frozen for existing claimants and halved for new recipients.

At the same time, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) would invest an extra £1bn a year in employment support by 2029-30 in order to help get more disabled people into work.

Disabled people would also get a new right to try work without immediately losing access to benefits, while those whose lifelong conditions mean they will never be able to work would be given a benefits premium and spared reassessments.

‘Helping people who can work to do so’

Work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall, who launched the Pathways to Work green paper in a statement to Parliament, said the proposals were about “helping people who can work to do so, protecting those most in need, and delivering respect and dignity for all”.

The DWP will not publish an impact assessment of the reforms until next week, so it is not known as yet how many people will have their benefits cuts. However, charities warned the proposals would drive many disabled people into deeper poverty.

Scope said the changes would be “catastrophic for disabled people’s living standards”, while the Centre for Mental Health warned that they would worsen mental health, a concern also raised by NHS leaders.

Rising benefits caseload and cost

The green paper is the government’s response to the significant increase in the number of working-age people claiming disability benefits (mainly PIP) or incapacity benefits (employment and support allowance or the health element of universal credit) in the wake of the pandemic, and the ensuing rise in costs.

According to think-tank the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), spending in Great Britain on these benefits grew from £36bn to £48bn in real-terms from 2019-20 to 2023-24 and are projected to hit £63bn in 2028-29 (in 2024-25 prices).

Annual spending on disability benefits grew by 45% in real-terms, and the number of recipients by 39%, while the inflation-adjusted cost of incapacity benefit grew by 26% and the caseload by 28%, from 2019-20 to 2023-24.

Greater levels of disability in population

The government has admitted that this has been, in part, caused by rising levels of disability, with 36% of people of working-age now having a long-term health condition, up from 29% a decade ago.

However, it said that this was being outstripped by the rise in the number of successful claims for disability or incapacity benefits. According to DWP figures, the number of disabled working-age people in England and Wales increased by 17%, but the numbers receiving an incapacity or disability benefit increased by double that amount (34%), from 2019-20 to 2023-24.

The DWP said this meant that the “structure of the benefits system” was partly responsible for the rise in cases.

In particular, the green paper said there was a “perverse” incentive within the incapacity benefits system for people to be found to have “limited capability for work and work-related activity” through the work capability assessment (WCA).

As a result, they are put on the health element of universal credit (UC) and receive £97 per week, in addition to the standard universal credit allowance, which is worth £91 per week for single people aged over 25. The difference in what they receive and what is given to those just on the standard allowance has grown over time due to a freeze in the standard allowance from 2015-19.

Changes to out-of-work benefits for disabled people

To address this issue, the DWP said it would:

• Scrap the WCA, meaning people would no longer be assessed on how far their disabilities or health conditions limited their ability to work. In future, the health element of UC would only be available to people assessed as eligible for the daily living component of PIP (see below). This is expected to come into force in 2028-29.
• Freeze the health element of UC at £97 per week until 2029-30 for existing claimants and halve the rate to £50 per week for new claimants, from 2026-27. In the spring statement on 26 March 2025, the government said that the £50 per week rate for new claimants would also be frozen until 2029-30.
• Increase the standard allowance of UC – for new and existing claimants – from £91 to £98 per week, from 2026-27. Combined with the cuts to the health element, this would significantly narrow the gap between payments to people without health conditions who only receive the standard allowance and those with a condition who receive both the standard allowance and health element.
• Consult on raising the minimum age for the UC health element from 18 to 22, with the savings reinvested in work support for young people. This would be to “remove any potential
  disincentive to work” and support the government’s “youth guarantee”, to give those aged 18-21 access to education, training or help to find a job.
• Enhance investment in employment support for people who are out of work who have a work-limiting health condition or disability, with an extra £1bn a year provided by 2029-30.

To protect those with the highest needs, the DWP said it would pay an additional premium on the health element of UC for those with severe, life-long health conditions, who have no prospect of improvement and will never be able to work, and ensure that they would not have to have to be reassessed.

Restricting access to PIP

Despite the government’s emphasis on getting more disabled people into work, one of the biggest measures in the green paper is restricting access to PIP, which is designed to compensate people for the costs of disability and is paid regardless of work status.

The DWP said spending on PIP was “becoming unaffordable” and needed to be focused on those with higher needs.

To restrict eligibility, it plans to bar people from receiving the daily living component if they do not score at least four points on any one of the 10 assessed activities, a policy that would apply to new applicants from 2026-27 and existing claimants, at the point of review. To be eligible for the daily living component of PIP, you must score at least eight points across all 10 activities.

Under the plans, you would not be eligible if you needed assistance to wash your hair or wash below your waist (two points) or needed assistance getting in or out of the shower (three points), under the washing and bathing activity, unless you scored four points or more in one of the other activities.

The DWP said it was “mindful of the impact this change could have on people” and so would consult on offering a review of disabled people’s health and eligible social care needs should they lose access to PIP.

Loss of benefit

The IFS said the impact of the reforms to PIP was uncertain because the consequences of changes to eligibility criteria were hard to predict. However, it added that:

• People who received the health element of UC but were not eligible for PIP would lose access to the health element through entitlement being based on the PIP assessment. This would make them worse off by £2,400 a year (in today’s prices), from 2028-29. Currently, 600,000 people qualify for the health element of UC but do not receive PIP.
• About 2.4m families would be worse off by £280 a year by 2029-30 due to the freeze in the health element of UC.
• New claimants for the health element of UC would be worse off by £2,500 a year than were the green paper changes not introduced.

The proposals sparked widespread anger from disability and anti-poverty charities.

Government ‘choosing to penalise some of society’s poorest’

With almost half of families in poverty having at least one disabled person, Scope said the government was “choosing to penalise some of the poorest people in our society”.

While welcoming the increased investment in employment support, the charity’s executive director of strategy, James Taylor, said this would be undermined by the benefits cuts.

“These cuts will be a catastrophe for disabled peoples’ living standards and independence,” he added. “The government will be picking up the pieces in other parts of the system with pressure on an already overwhelmed NHS and social care, as more disabled people are pushed into poverty.”

Impact on carers and child poverty

The End Child Poverty Coalition and Child Poverty Action Group warned that the measures risked deepening child poverty – which the government is developing a strategy to tackle – while the Carers Trust and Carers UK flagged up the impact of the proposals on carers.

Access to carer’s allowance is dependent on the person caring for someone who receives one of a set of disability benefits, and Carers UK said half of awards are tied to the person being cared for receiving PIP. It also pointed to the fact that disability rates are higher among carers than in the general population, with about 150,000 people receiving both PIP and carer’s allowance.

“1.2 million unpaid carers in the UK are living in poverty, (with 400,000 in deep poverty),” said its chief executive, Helen Walker. “Raising the qualifying threshold for support could mean even more carers will struggle to afford essentials like food and heating.”

Risk of deterioration in mental health

The Centre for Mental Health, meanwhile, warned of an adverse impact of the policy changes on people’s mental health.

While welcoming the planned increase in employment support funding, chief executive Andy Bell said: “Evidence shows that when governments tighten benefit rules, people’s mental health gets worse. If more people fall into poverty, both the prevalence and severity of mental ill health is likely to rise.”

This issue was also picked up by health trust representative body NHS Providers, which warned that the proposals risked increasing pressures on mental health services.

“Mental health trust leaders previously told us that changes to universal credit and benefits were increasing demand for services, as were loneliness, homelessness and wider deprivation,” said its interim chief executive, Saffron Cordery.”

“With poor mental health the leading driver of ill-health related economic inactivity, they will also be worried that today’s announcement could lead to worse mental and physical health for patients and shift further costs and pressures onto the health and care system, including overstretched emergency departments and mental health services.”

By Professor Andy Bilson and Dr Matthew Jay

Our study using national data estimated that a quarter of all children in England became a child in need before their 18th birthday.

This means that these children, according to section 17 of the Children Act 1989, required services from children’s social care because they were disabled or would not otherwise reach a basic level of wellbeing.

The findings highlight the significant reach of social care interventions and raise questions about the systemic issues contributing to such widespread need.

The Department for Education’s (DfE) annual children in need census indicated that 3.4% of all children aged 0-17 were classified as “in need” on 31 March 2023. But this is an annual snapshot.

Estimating childhood rates of involvement

Our team took a different approach, using an anonymised version of the dataset to track children’s social care involvement over time.

As the DfE’s data doesn’t cover an 18-year period, we estimated cumulative incidences using three different birth cohorts, employing statistical models to ensure double counting of individuals was ruled out. In this way we produced a more comprehensive view of how many children interact with social care services throughout their lives, rather than just a yearly snapshot.

We estimated that 25.3% of all children would be identified as “in need” at least once before adulthood. Our findings are supported by earlier research by Professor Bilson, in which local authorities said that 14% of children in their areas had been a child in need before their fifth birthday in 2017.

Additionally, our study estimated that, before turning 18:

• 35.4% of children have been referred to social care services;
• 32.3% have undergone a social work assessment;
• 6.9% have become subject to a child protection plan.

Prevalence of abuse or neglect concerns

As a statistical study, we were not able to look at the quality or nature of the child in need services offered to children. Support may range from parenting assistance and home adaptations, under a child in need plan, to child protection plans or being taken into care, depending on the child’s circumstances.

However, a recent freedom of information request made to the DfE by Professor Bilson showed that, for 78% of all children placed on a child in need plan between 2015 and 2023, the initial need was either because of abuse or neglect or family dysfunction. The latter category refers to families where social workers consider that chronically inadequate parenting is impairing the child’s health and development “but for whom there is not yet hard enough evidence to invoke child protection measures.” (DfE Children in Need Census Guide).

Given our finding about the proportion of children who become involved with children’s social care, this suggests that nearly one in five children may be classified as in need, during their childhoods, because of concerns about abuse or neglect or inadequate parenting.

Higher rates of intervention in deprived areas

The Child Welfare Inequalities Project found that in England, the rate of children on a child protection plan (CPP) in the most deprived 10% of the country was 2.4 times the national average.

As noted above, we found that 6.9% of children were made subject to a children protection plan during their childhoods. If the deprivation ratio from the Child Welfare Inequalities Project holds for childhood involvement, this means that one in every six children in the most deprived 10% of areas would have been on a child protection plan before their eighteenth birthday.

Also, if we were to assume that the same ratio holds in relation to children being classed as in need, this would mean more than three out of five children in the most deprived 10% of the country would have been deemed to require services to achieve a basic level of wellbeing during their childhoods. And in most such cases, this would have been because of concerns about abuse or neglect or inadequate parenting.

Implications for policy and practice

The study’s findings have significant implications for social work practice, policymaking and resource allocation. The data suggests that children’s social care is not just an emergency intervention for a minority, but a service that touches the lives of many families, potentially a majority in the most deprived areas.

It also raises concerns about whether adequate support is in place to prevent families from reaching the point where their health or development is in jeopardy, particularly for those in the most deprived communities.

There were about 225,000 child protection investigations in England last year. Combined with the fact that the principal need for the majority of children in need relates to suspicions of abuse or neglect, it is likely that the focus of most such interventions would be investigative.

Need to tackle root causes of vulnerability 

With child poverty levels remaining high and public services under pressure from extensive government cuts, social workers and policymakers must consider how best to address the root causes of children’s vulnerability. Investing in community support and development and tackling the impacts of poverty at its core may be key to reducing the long-term reliance on social care services.

We recommend that the government monitor the cumulative incidence of children receiving social care support and analyse data by measures of deprivation, with a view to addressing upstream health and social determinants of social work involvement.

As the sector continues to grapple with increasing demand and service cuts, these findings serve as a call to action for a more holistic approach to supporting children and families before social care intervention becomes necessary.

The research, published in the International Journal of Population Data Science, was led by Dr Matthew Jay (UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health) with collaborators at the University of Edinburgh, University of Central Lancashire, the Fisher Family Trust and the University of Westminster.

Most social workers believe poverty is not significantly, or at all, considered in social care assessments and plans, a Community Care poll has found.

This follows recent Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) data highlighting how rising poverty and homelessness are driving demand for children’s social care.

ADCS found that inadequate housing, welfare reforms and families lacking access to public funds were key factors behind increased safeguarding activity.

As of 2022-23, 4.3m – or 30% of – children were in relative poverty in the UK, meaning they lived in a household whose income was below 60% of the average after taking account of housing costs. 

This is up from 27% of children in 2021-22 (source: Institute for Fiscal Studies).

Despite this, a Community Care poll of 468 readers found that 62% felt poverty was ‘not at all’ or ‘not very much’ taken into account in social care assessments and planning. 

Only a quarter (25%) said it was ‘somewhat’ considered, and 13% believed it played a significant role.

Do you consider the impact of poverty when conducting an assessment or drawing up a care plan?

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Poverty and homelessness are driving demand for children’s social care, directors have warned.

Lack of adequate housing, welfare reforms and families lacking access to public funds are adding to pressures on children’s services, an Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) survey has found.

The findings come from the ADCS’s latest Safeguarding Pressures* research, its regular stocktake on the state of children’s social care in England, and were shared in a submission to the government’s child poverty taskforce.

The taskforce was set up last year to develop a cross-government strategy to alleviate child poverty, which is due this spring. It is examining how the government can increase household incomes, including through welfare reforms that raise employment levels and reduce poverty, help bring down the cost of essential goods and alleviate the negative impacts of poverty.

Rising levels of child poverty

As of 2022-23, 4.3m – or 30% of – children were in relative poverty in the UK, meaning they lived in a household whose income was below 60% of the average after taking account of housing costs. This is up from 27% of children in 2021-22 (source: Institute for Fiscal Studies).

In its submission, the ADCS cited past research that has identified a strong link between levels of deprivation in an area and children’s social care involvement (Bywaters et al), and said the Safeguarding Pressures survey had found increasing demand driven by poverty.

Poverty driving demand for children’s social care

Based on responses from 86 of the 153 authorities, the survey, carried out last year, found:

• Almost three-quarters had seen demand from families in poverty rise as a result of welfare reforms, particularly among larger families with three or more children. This is likely related to the introduction in 2017 of a two-child cap on household claims for child tax credit or universal credit.
• Nearly two-thirds said that poverty-driven demand has grown from families where one or more parents were in work.
• 59% said that increased demand on services was being driven by poor quality housing, while 61% reported increased safeguarding activity linked with homelessness and 54% said that demand on children’s social care was being driven by housing need amongst homeless young people.
• Almost half said service demand had risen in relation to families with no recourse to public funds (NRPF), who are unable to access benefits or help with housing due to their immigration status.

‘Incalculable’ impact of poverty on childhood

“The impact of poverty on childhood is incalculable, children arrive at school hungry and are unable to focus on learning, families are queuing up at food banks and schools are routinely buying coats, shoes and even washing clothes for pupils and their families,” the ADCS said.

“ADCS members believe that failure to address child poverty risks undermining the success of a range of planned reforms right across government.”

*The full results of the latest wave of the Safeguarding Pressures series will be published shortly.

More children are at risk of extra-familial harm or living in families using food banks or accessing benefits, children’s social workers have reported.

However, in the face of this rising need, most practitioners believe that key support services for families, including those offering financial assistance or counselling, are “poor”.

Those were among the findings of an online survey of 570 children’s social workers working for councils or children’s trusts in England, carried out by Frontline in June 2024.

The charity, which delivers the fast-track Approach Social Work qualifying training programme, also found practitioners were battling high caseloads and a lack of resources, with most feeling that they did not see children on their caseloads often enough.

As in previous surveys of social workers, a large majority of respondents also reported feeling that the profession was viewed negatively by the public.

Rising levels of extra-familial harm

Almost four in five social workers (79%) said they had seen a rise in the number of young people at risk of extra-familial harm. Of this group, 70% had seen rising levels of criminal exploitation, 60% sexual exploitation and 58% online harm.

The finding chimes with an analysis of official data on factors identified following child in need assessments from 2014-21, which identified a disproportionate rise in the number of cases involving risks outside the home during this period.

In relation to poverty, 85% of social workers reported a rise in the number of families they worked with who were using food banks, while 70% said more of these families were accessing benefits.

The proportion of children living in absolute poverty* in the UK – after taking into account of housing costs – rose from 23% to 25% between 2021-22 and 2022-23, official figures show.

Support services for families ‘poor’

However, despite this rising level of reported need, most social workers believed key services that they could refer families to were “poor”.

Almost three-quarters (73%) gave this rating to housing assistance programmes, with 66% doing so for counselling and mental health support, 59% for financial assistance schemes and 57% for specialist educational resources.

Practitioners were more positive about substance misuse, parenting support and domestic abuse programmes, but in each case, majorities rated provision as poor or fair.

High caseloads and underfunding

In an echo of multiple previous surveys of social workers, respondents said workloads and underfunding were undermining practice.

When asked for the three biggest barriers to their abilities to do their jobs well, 65% cited high caseloads, 57% a lack of resources and 54% funding constraints.

Reflecting this, three out of five respondents said they did not think they saw each child who they were responsible for often enough.

Social work shortages ‘set to increase’

The finding comes against the backdrop of longstanding pressures on local authority budgets and the social work workforce, both of which have been labelled as “critical risks” by the Department for Education (DfE).

Latest DfE figures show a vacancy rate of 18.9% among statutory children’s social workers in England and, in its 2023-24 annual report, the department said it expected the shortage of practitioners to increase over the coming decade.

Practitioners surveyed by Frontline were relatively satisfied with their supervision, with a majority saying they say their supervisor often enough and more than 85% saying that supervision was helpful for their work.

Social workers downbeat about public perceptions of profession

However, 91% felt that social workers were perceived negatively by the public and 94% said public perceptions and media portrayals of the profession affected their ability to work with children and families.

This echoes the findings of research last year commissioned by Social Work England, which found that 11% of social workers felt the profession was well-respected within society.

Analysis by linguistics academic Dr Maria Leedham found that, in a three-month period in 2019, there were four times as many negative stories about social work than positive ones, though the majority were neutral.

Separate research by Leedham identified that social workers rarely featured in TV programmes and, when they did, they almost always worked in child protection and were described as either judgmental bureaucrats or child snatchers.

However, more positively, the Social Work England-commissioned research found that 74% of adults in England felt that social workers wanted the best for people they worked with and 62% thought they made a big difference to improving people’s lives.

‘Not nearly enough has changed’ in social work

Mary Jackson, chief executive officer, Frontline (credit: Frontline)

Reflecting on Frontline’s findings, the charity’s chief executive, Mary Jackson, said: “Not nearly enough has changed in terms of improving support for children, families and social workers and now the challenges are compounded by worsening poverty and the rise of extra-familial harms.”

On the back of the research, Frontline called on the government and councils to:

1. Take action to tackle child poverty and extra-familial harm, in order to improve child safety.
2. Improve support for families, including by enabling social workers to spend more time with them.
3. Launch a national campaign to change public perceptions of social work, to increase its appeal as a career, help existing social workers feel appreciated and help challenge the stigma families sometimes face when they have a social worker.

*Under the government’s definition, absolute poverty means living in a household whose income is less than 60% of the median income in 2010-11, adjusted for inflation and household size.

Councils’ response to child neglect is “slow and inadequate” due to high thresholds for intervention and a lack of services, the NSPCC has found.

A third of social workers polled by the charity said they had faced pressure from managers or colleagues to cease or delay intervention in neglect cases, while professionals in partner agencies criticised how children’s social care responded to the issue.

Neglect is defined by the government as “the persistent failure to meet a child’s basic physical and/or psychological needs, [which is] likely to result in the serious impairment of the child’s health or development” (source: Working Together to Safeguard Children).

Call for national strategy to tackle ‘normalisation’ of neglect

In a report published last week, the NSPCC warned that a ‘normalisation’ of neglect, amid high rates of poverty and long-term cuts to preventive services, was resulting in children being left for too long in harmful situations.

However, it said that neither the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care (the “care review”), which reported in 2022, and the previous government’s response to it, the Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy, addressed the issue adequately.

The charity, which polled 100 social workers and 600 teachers, police officers and healthcare professionals for its report, urged the government to develop a national neglect strategy and improved guidance for practitioners on tackling the issue, tied to ministers’ plans to tackle child poverty.

Most common category of abuse

Neglect is the most common initial category of abuse recorded in child protection plans in England, accounting for just under half (49.3%) of cases as of March 2023.

Recorded levels of neglect have remained consistent since 2019, as have the numbers of emotional abuse cases, during which time levels of recorded physical abuse, sexual abuse and multiple abuse have fallen.

The NSPCC found that 82% of social workers – and 54% of all professionals surveyed – had seen an increase in the level of neglect during their professional lifetimes. Of those who had seen an increase, 90% said this had been driven by increases in the cost of living and poverty, with 76% citing cuts in community support to parents.

The latter reflects the 44% fall in council spending on early intervention services from 2010-11 to 2022-23 identified in analysis for the NSPCC and fellow children’s charities (source: Larkham, J, 2024).

However, practitioners who took part in online focus groups for the NSPCC’s study, told the charity that neglect often did not meet the threshold for intervention.

Social workers ‘encouraged to delay action’ on neglect 

A third of social workers surveyed said they had been encouraged by a colleague or a manager to delay or cease action on a neglect, compared with 21% who had experienced this in relation to other forms of maltreatment.

Reflecting this, 52% of teachers polled said children’s social care usually responded slowly to neglect cases.

The NSPCC linked this to the child protection system being “heavily skewed” to identifying individual incidents that meet the threshold of a child suffering, or being likely to suffer, significant harm.

“Unlike other forms of abuse, neglect rarely manifests as a crisis requiring immediate action,” the report said. “This makes it challenging to identify as practitioners must consider the severity, frequency, developmental timing and duration of neglectful behaviour, to address whether it reaches the threshold for intervention.”

Lack of services to tackle neglect

Even where neglect was identified, practitioners reported that there was a lack of services to support families.

Only 19% of police officers said they thought appropriate action was taken to give the child and family the necessary support to address neglect and 21% said this support was never given. More broadly, 83% of all professionals surveyed said there were not enough services in their areas to provide targeted support to children and families in these cases.

Education and health professionals pointed to a lack of resource and expertise to address neglect in early help services, with teachers in particular highlighting the challenge of families accessing services based on parental consent.

Meanwhile, social workers also highlighted the lack of specialist interventions for children affected by neglect, contrary to practice in relation to child exploitation.

Social care reform strategy ‘does not address neglect’

The NSPCC said the previous government had not adequately addressed neglect through its Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy.

That document made just four references to neglect – all in the context of child maltreatment more generally – though it dealt with specific forms of abuse and exploitation similarly.

It said that the strategy’s flagship reform – to create multi-disciplinary family help teams, merged from targeted early help and child in need services, to improve the timeliness and effectiveness of family support – could “transform the response to neglect”.

The charity said that the new Labour government should make sure that pathfinder local authorities develop an early response to neglect as part of their testing of the family help reform.

This should focus on engaging with and nurturing families where neglect is present in order to encourage them to engage and accept help.

Call for neglect strategy

More broadly, the NSPCC called on the government to develop a national neglect strategy, in order to share the latest best practice, learning and evidence about neglect, its links to poverty, its impact over time and what works in tackling it, both through universal and specialist services, and to improve training for relevant practitioners.

Alongside this, the government should examine the case for amending the definition of neglect in Working Together to Safeguard Children (see above), including potentially removing the reference to the harm being “persistent”.

“No child should be left to experience maltreatment until it is deemed to be ‘persistent’ enough for intervention,” the charity said. “The opportunity to intervene early is then missed, with devastating consequences for the child, and a need for more costly late-stage
intervention.”

The NSPCC pointed out that definitions of neglect in Wales and Northern Ireland did not reference persistence. It added in Scotland, the definition, while referencing persistence stresses that single instances of neglect can cause significant harm.

Social Work Recap is a weekly series where we present key news, events, conversations, tweets and campaigns around social work from the preceding week.

Ramadan Mubarak from all of us at Community Care and happy Social Work Week!

From this year’s World Social Work Day celebrations and a new podcast on the ‘ghost children’ missing from school each year to Love Island’s latest winner, here’s this week’s line-up:

World Social Work Day

Photo credit: International Federation of Social Workers

Councils and social work organisations from across the world took to social media on Tuesday to share the various ways in which they were celebrating World Social Work Day.

Under the hashtag #WSWD23, professionals uploaded photos of conferences, doughnuts, art projects, themed t-shirts and educational sessions to honour the profession. Here’s how it went down:

Donuts arrived in chippenham happy world social work day #wearewilts pic.twitter.com/GHWNv0q3mq

— Louise Downes (@LouiseDownes8) March 21, 2023

Happy World Social Work Day. We are celebrating with donuts @wiltscouncil to say thank you to our social care workforce for being amazing everyday! #wswd2023 pic.twitter.com/nLz8vyPp88

— Emma Legg (@EmmaLegg6) March 21, 2023

Happy World Social Work Day #WSWD2023 @BASW_UK @HullSWAcademy these are the lovely cards that our children and young people designed ? pic.twitter.com/8huplQOpSZ

— Claire Rutherford (@ClaireRhullcc) March 21, 2023

i had the privilege and honour to be the opening speaker at day 2 of #WSWD2023 social work conference in Sierra Leone. i spoke on “Cultural Diversity in Social Work Practice: a UK perspective”

long live social work! and long live Sierra Leone!! ??? pic.twitter.com/2HrtrC7TeL

— Jason (@jsnbarn) March 22, 2023

Celebrating World Social Work @UniofBradford –

Students from across the social work courses making a noise and a real difference. Raising cash and accepting donations for the local food bank

Massive thanks too everyone that made this happen #WSWD2023 #bestjobintheworld pic.twitter.com/ZxkNombYau

— Brian Mitchell (@briantheroomie) March 21, 2023

Today is World Social Work Day, which is celebrated on the third Tuesday of March. This year’s theme is “Respecting Diversity through Joint Social Action”. It reflects the role of social workers in creating the worlds in which people can thrive #WSWD2023 @AASW_ @BASW_UK pic.twitter.com/kiJjE8fQLJ

— Trinh Mai (@MsTrinhMai) March 21, 2023

Wonderful to chat with Kerry and Gill from @SheffieldCarers at today’s #WSWD2023 #SocialWorkWeek2023 conference Sheffield Town hall . Thank you for all that you do @CarersTrust @ALLIANCECarerVo #EffectingChange23 pic.twitter.com/HJQAzVAOBR

— Tommy Whitelaw BCAh (@tommyNtour) March 24, 2023

Our Medical Social Work team in CHI at Crumlin are out promoting World #SocialWorkDay.

Thank you to all our CHI Medical Social Work teams for their incredible work and the support they provide to our patients, families & teams?#WSWD2023 #ourchildrenshospital pic.twitter.com/xJAd587NHh

— Children’s Health Ireland (@CHI_Ireland) March 21, 2023

This year’s theme was respecting diversity through joint social action and, alongside the celebrations, the British Association of Social Workers (BASW) held a series of events through March exploring the theme and reflecting on practice.

You can check out BASW’s full programme for their ‘World Social Work Month’ here.

Social Work England’s Social Work Week

Credit: Social Work England

Social Work England ran a five-day programme of online sessions this week for social work professionals, students and people with lived experiences.

The regulator’s second ‘Social Work Week’, which ended today, had three key objectives – learning about social work and people’s experiences in the sector, connecting social workers and others involved with the profession, and influencing the future of social work.

Its sessions ranged from improving LGBTQ+ social care and reflections on social work regulation, co-production and professional identity to report writing, tackling racism in the workplace and practising social work in different settings, such as prisons and hospitals.

BBC podcast series on ‘ghost children’

Arthur Labinjo-Hughes (photo: West Midlands Police)

On the back of the tragic case of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes, the BBC has launched a podcast series in which journalist Terri White, a survivor of child abuse, investigates what has happened to children who are persistently absent from school. Arthur was murdered by his husband’s partner while off school during the first Covid lockdown.

“Unlike some kids, the classroom wasn’t a place I was desperate to escape every day,” White wrote in a BBC article about the podcast. “Instead, the piles of books, stacks of paper and pots of pens were my escape. They were a portal to another world. Another life.”

“I have long wondered what would have happened to me if I hadn’t had school.”

Drawing on her own experience, White launches her own investigation, traveling across the country to “find out where these kids are, why they’re absent and what is being done to address the issue”.

The first episode of Finding Britain’s Ghost Children was published on 22 March. You can listen to it here.

Government to cut £250m from social work workforce funding

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The Health Service Journal has reported that the government plans to cut £250m from a £500m fund to support the adult social care workforce in England from 2022-25.

The fund, first announced in the December 2021 white paper, People at the Heart of Care, was designed to provide “investment in knowledge, skills, health and wellbeing, and recruitment policies [that] will improve social care as a long-term career choice”.

This was against the backdrop of severe workforce pressures across adult care, with vacancies of 165,000 as of March 2022 and low wages reportedly driving staff into retail and hospitality.

A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care told The Guardian, which picked up the story, that they would not comment on leaks and that the “government remains committed to the 10-year vision set out in the People at the Heart of Care white paper and have made good progress on implementing it”.

4.2m children  living in poverty in 2021-22

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Around 4.2m million children were living in relative poverty in the year to April 2022, up 350,000 on the previous year, according to government figures released this week.

The Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) said that the rise was largely because of the government scrapping the £20 uplift to universal credit introduced during the pandemic halfway through the year.

Children from Asian and black families were overrepresented, with 47% of the former and 53% of the latter living in poverty compared to 25% of those from white families.

“In the face of today’s grim figures, and with another rise in inflation, it’s inexcusable for ministers to sit on their hands,” said CPAG’s chief executive, Alison Garnham, who called on the government to extend free schools meals, boost child benefit, remove the cap on how much households can receive in benefits and end the two-child limit on additional welfare payments.

Social worker wins Love Island

 

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A post shared by Sanam Harrinanan (@sanamiee)

On a lighter note, a newly qualified social worker from Bedford has won this year’s Love Island!

Sanam Harrinanan, 24, started her career in the profession in March 2022 and has cited her and fellow winner Kai Fagan’s love for “helping children” as one of the main reasons behind their success as a couple.

However, shortly after her win, the social worker admitted she wouldn’t be able to return to the day job after her time off in the South African villa.

“I can’t go into social work again, I don’t think I’ll be able to,” she told Heat World magazine.

“But I’ve got a meeting about it this week with my social work manager because I want to be able to use this platform to help children locally.

“I still want to do the same thing I was doing but in a different capacity,” she added. “But it’s just finding out what that capacity is and how I can do it.”

 Must Listen: The Social Matters Podcast

Launched in 2018, The Social Matters Podcast is a bi-monthly audio series that sees three friends “who happen to be social workers” give their take on trending social issues.

With the help of various guests, the trio tackle everything from working on sexual abuse cases, anti-racist practices and food banks to virtual reality in social work.

Tweet of the week

Happy World Social Day to social workers around the world. Never underestimate the work you do. Bring hope. Be kind. Be the Difference. Recognise yourself and your connection to the global profession today.

— Siobhan Maclean (@SiobhanMaclean) March 21, 2023

Social worker and author Siobhan Maclean has captured the essence of World Social Work Day perfectly in one tweet.

Councils in England are failing to protect children subject to immigration control, including by rarely recognising their poverty as a safeguarding issue, a study has found.

In many of the 26 serious case reviews (SCRs) analysed, practitioners did not understand the implications of families having no recourse to public funds (NRPF), offering them inappropriate advice or refusing support, it found.

The NRPF rule excludes most temporary migrants in the UK from access to benefits, homelessness assistance or social housing through their local authority.

The children in the SCRs studied were often malnourished, lacking access to healthcare, and living in inappropriate or insecure accommodation such as overcrowded housing.

Domestic abuse was present in several cases and was sometimes exacerbated by immigration status. For example, one woman was left financially dependent on the perpetrator after her student visa expired and she was left unable to work or claim benefits, while another was pressured to have a termination by her partner threatening to get her deported.

Despite families’ level of need, services sometimes closed cases before probing further or did not follow up after losing contact with a family.

The study attributed this to the English child protection system’s focus on parental harm, not harm caused by socio-economic factors, such as poverty, immigration status or race.

Prevalence of destitution

Destitution was a prevalent issue across the cases, with a number of reviews mentioning children going hungry. In one SCR, school staff reported children arriving poorly clothed and undernourished, referring them to the school nurse for concerns about their eating.

Many of the families had also experienced homelessness or insecure or inappropriate accommodation, with two reviews mentioning overcrowded housing.

The study said the destitution families faced arising from their NRPF status harmed children and undermined parents’ ability to care for them.

However, when there was no parental abuse or neglect present, destitution was regarded as low risk, it found, resulting in cases being closed following assessment, or assessments not being initiated or being left incomplete.

Some families were refused payments under section 17 of the Children Act 1989 – including on the erroneous ground that it was prohibited by NRPF status. Where these were given, they were sometimes extremely low, for example, £65 a week for a family of three. Accommodation provided under section 17 was also sometimes inappropriate, the study found.

Culture and language factors not addressed

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Language barriers often hampered agency responses, but the study found a lack of effort was made to address them.

In some cases, there was an absence of professional interpreters even where the parents did not speak English. Family members were commonly used instead, with implications for confidentiality. In one review, this had contributed to a mother being kept in an “isolated and potentially oppressed position”.  Other interpreting practices included using Google Translate, the paper found.

The ethnicity of children was either missing or incomplete in some records. In one case where it was recorded, its impact on the family was given little consideration, while another SCR found race, culture and religion had not been taken into account.

Professionals felt uncomfortable inquiring about cultural background, resulting in assumptions that then informed assessments and plans, reported the study

Inadequate information sharing

Reviews expressed concerns about information sharing, especially when children were moved from area to area, with a lack of notification systems and families being left without details about support services in their new areas.

The report also identified a lack of communication between different agencies, finding that inadequate information sharing between GPs and health visiting services led to a missed opportunity to support a mother and daughter.

However, it also found that “the lack of information sharing for child welfare or safeguarding contrasted sharply with well-developed information-sharing processes for immigration control purposes”.

All but two of the local authorities in the SCRs were members of the NRPF Connect database, enabling them to automatically share information with the Home Office.

The paper concluded that families, at times, avoided professionals for fear of alerting the immigration authorities, adding: “The task of safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children is made more difficult when information sharing with immigration authorities takes precedence over communicating with children, their parents and other professionals.”

Lack of understanding of immigration status

Practitioners did not always understand different immigration statuses and the entitlements they entailed, leading to inappropriate advice and support, such as wrongful denial of section 17 payments to destitute families with NRPF.

This lack of knowledge also led to missed opportunities for support, while the report also found that NRPF status brought about suspicion and scepticism that further complicated accessing services.

“An assumption that families were not really destitute and were fraudulent sometimes took precedence over child welfare concerns,” it added.

Procedures ‘do not protect children’

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Co-author Dr Andrew Jolly attributed services’ poor practice to a lack of government guidance and the child protection system not fitting well with immigration control.

“There’s an assumption there’s a safety net, which doesn’t exist for these children,” he said “So even if local authorities and other agencies are meeting what’s required of them, there’s still going to be children who slipped through the net because there aren’t protective procedures to support them.”

One case review wrote that, “lawful and efficient responses are not always enough to compensate for the very particular vulnerabilities of the extremely marginalised group represented by those who have no recourse to public funds”.

Jolly added: “I think that is the absolute heart of the issue. Even when organisations are following procedures, the procedures themselves do not protect children in this group.”

The report said that, to effectively safeguard children in families with NRPF, professionals needed to take into account the impact of the poverty and other inequalities arising from their status.

Jolly added: “If a child hasn’t got enough to eat and it’s a result of a parent or caregiver, we know how to respond to that. But when a child doesn’t have enough to eat, and it’s a direct result of structural issues, we don’t know how to respond to it, and we don’t see it as neglectful. But actually, the experiences of that child are the same.”

A Department for Education spokesperson said local authorities have “clear responsibilities to support children in need and in cases where there are child protection concerns. This includes children in families who have no recourse to public funds.”

They added that the DfE’s legal guidance “clearly sets out a range of factors that should be considered when assessing a child’s needs”, including housing, income and employment status.

“We will be setting out ambitious plans to improve children’s social care, which will look at where having no recourse to public funds is a factor in these children’s lives,” they added.

This is a reference to its forthcoming response to three reports on reforming children’s social care, in particular, the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care’s final report. This found that families with no recourse to public funds faced “particular challenges in accessing support from children’s social care, with the proportion of referrals received for these families resulting in services being provided under section 17 varying widely”.

About the study

Pictured: co-author Dr Andrew Jolly, social work lecturer at University of Plymouth /
Photo credit: Andrew Jolly

The study, Children and families with no recourse to public funds: learning from case reviews, was carried out by Dr Andrew Jolly, lecturer in social work at the University of Plymouth, and Anna Gupta, professor of social work at Royal Holloway, University of London.

It identified 26 SCRs in England from the NSPCC national case review repository detailing the deaths or serious abuse of children in families with NRPF, dating from 2006, with 18 published from 2016-21.

When analysing them, the authors focused on the role of NRPF and how it interplayed with children’s other vulnerabilities.

The findings were grouped based on correlative issues detected, such as mental health or housing, and divided into two themes, ‘children’s and family experiences’ and ‘agency responses’.

The cost of living crisis is ‘severely’ affecting people accessing children’s and adults’ services, fuelling a host of issues including poverty, debt, mental ill-health and domestic conflict, social workers have warned.

The vast majority of respondents to a Community Care survey asking about the effects of the crisis said it was hitting individuals and families they support hard.

More than half (58%) said it was having a ‘severe’ impact on the lives of people accessing service, with a further 33% saying the effect was ‘significant’.

Food bank use and homelessness risks

Dozens of comments left by the 253 survey respondents, about two-thirds of whom said they worked in children’s services, made reference to rising food bank use.

Some warned that local food banks were running out of supplies due to sharply increasing demand and the wider public no longer being able to afford to donate as much.

Many others cited households facing desperate choices between heating and eating, with poverty leading to deteriorating housing conditions and, for some, the risk of homelessness. One social worker said:

[The crisis is affecting] service users massively – most were already experiencing poverty before, now they are in dire straits.”

In all, 86% of survey respondents said they expected to see a large increase in demand for services over the next 12 months as winter arrived and the crisis bit even harder. This week, energy regulator Ofgem raised its price cap for the average household to £3,549 per year from October, almost three times higher than it was a year ago.

‘Clients cancelling a service they need’

Worryingly, among practitioners working in adults’ services, almost half (48%) of respondents said they had seen a large increase in the numbers of people in receipt of council-funded care and support who were struggling to afford care charges.

Almost as many (44%) said they had seen a small increase.

“I have seen clients falling into debt, not able to pay their care charges and asking to cancel a service they need,” said one.

Another worker, based in a front door team, said they were getting “several calls every day” from people feeling suicidal due to cost of living. They said:

Elderly people are refusing to have care due to the cost, which they cannot afford alongside their bills.”

The social worker added. “We are also getting calls from people with no money for food, who need food banks, and calls from people being evicted as they cannot afford bills and rent.”

A number of respondents noted that the previous decade’s austerity policies had meant there were now far fewer services where people could get support and advice around issues such as debt management or maximising benefits.

“People are not buying medication that is required, not visiting families because they are unable to afford transport or fuel for their car, and not socialising, due to costs,” said one. “So they are often becoming very isolated.”

‘Unachievable’ need for financial support for families

A similarly bleak outlook was apparent among children’s social workers contributing to the survey.

In all 49%, told us they had seen a large increase in the number of families receiving financial support under children’s social care legislation – such as section 17 of the Children Act – in their areas. A further 37% said they had seen a small increase in the number of families in receipt of financial support. One practitioner said:

Every family known to social care needs support via section 17 – every family. It’s unachievable.”

Others said the cost of living crisis was affecting some families more than others, with one commenting that parents in low-paid work had been hit particularly hard compared with others whose incomes came exclusively from benefits.

“I am seeing lots more referrals coming through because of financial pressures,” the social worker said. “The knock-on effects [include] mental ill-health, stress, domestic abuse and abuse of children – people are struggling to manage, and feel immense shame in needing to access things like food banks due to debt.”

Besides hardship around food and fuel, social workers highlighted struggles particular to families with children, such as being unable to afford to buy school uniform or to pay for activities.

Worsening mental health for parents and children

Another children’s practitioner said they had seen a “huge rise” in mental health issues among both parents and children as stress levels soared. “This is very evident in school, in loss of concentration on learning, self-harming, thoughts of suicide and early signs of eating disorders.” The social worker said all these impacts were being seen in older primary school-aged children.

Aside from families involved with help and protection services, a number of survey respondents also highlighted how the crisis has been affecting children in care, with several noting that foster carers in their area were facing hardship.

“[Some are] handing in their notice as they can’t afford to continue with rising living costs,” said one, echoing the findings of a recent survey by the FosterWiki information and advice service. “This means children and young people having to be placed well out of county, miles away from friends and schools, loads of them without suitable placements.”

‘A current of anxiety’

Looking ahead, few social workers, regardless of their specialism, saw any cause for optimism as winter approached.

The combination of food and fuel poverty, along with people being unable to meet care charges, will have grim and inevitable knock-on effects, adults’ practitioners warned.

“[It will lead] to safeguarding concerns, self-neglect and safety issues – and an increase in hospital admissions as a result,” said one.

Several respondents pointed out that people who might previously have ‘got by’ thanks to their support networks were likely to increasingly struggle as those around them were forced to take on more paid work to support themselves.

“Unpaid care takes up a large portion of care provided to individuals in the UK,” said one. “Unpaid carers may have to go into employment or increase hours in employment due to cost of living.”

Meanwhile children’s social workers said they foresaw additional strain on family budgets, further increasing tensions in people’s homes, leading to more conflict, abuse and neglect.

“It feels like everyone is always on the verge of a crisis – but there is an underlying current of anxiety, fear and anger that seems ready to bubble to the surface,” said one children’s practitioner. “I think once the summer is over and autumn hits this will magnify massively into a much more overt presentation from families.”

‘Bleak reality’

Responding to the findings of Community Care’s survey, Steve Crocker, the president of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS), said the cost of living crisis was “affecting households across the country, including the children and families we support and our staff”.

“These findings highlight the bleak reality for many of the children and families we work with, and the situation will only get worse in the winter months without further practical solutions from government to support families,” Crocker added.

“While local authorities up and down the country are working hard to provide services and support to their local residents to help with rising costs, we urgently need government to provide the long term solutions that are needed during this difficult time.

“We expect many more children and families will fall into poverty because of the rising costs of food, fuel and energy, yet there is no national strategy to reduce child poverty in England,” Crocker said. “Given what we know about the impact of poverty on children’s outcomes and life chances addressing it must be a priority for the new Prime Minister.”

A spokesperson for the British Association of Social Workers directed Community Care to a number of recent statements by the organisation. This included a submission to the children’s social care review that described the cost of living crisis as “a crisis for social workers [who] see the impact it has on people we work with every day”.

BASW was also a co-signatory to a recent letter to Conservative leadership candidates Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak by a group of charities and other organisations that described the impact of the cost of living crisis on low-income households as “the gravest issue our country faces”.

Article updated 10 January 2022

Rises in child poverty fuelled by benefit cuts was associated with more than 10,000 more children being taken into care between 2015 and 2020, a new study has estimated.

The research, which is currently being peer-reviewed, suggests 10,356 more children living in English local authority areas became looked after than would have been the case had poverty levels remained at 2015 levels.

It also estimates that almost 22,000 additional children were placed on child protection plans, and almost 52,000 began an episode of being in need, over the same timescale.

Researchers said the findings added to “growing evidence of the contributory causal nature of the relationship between child poverty and children’s social care involvement, much of it from the US”.

‘Double burden on poorer areas’

The study found increases in both child poverty and children’s services interventions disproportionately affected poorer boroughs, particularly in the North East but also the North West, parts of the Midlands and some coastal areas further south. It said this placed a “double burden” of deprivation on these places.

“Policies that move children into poverty may trigger cascading inequalities through child protection systems and beyond, as poverty clusters with the very childhood adversities it produces, giving rise to further inequalities in health, life and death,” the paper warned.

“Places that experience the double-burden of increased child poverty and numbers of children entering care must shoulder the wider societal costs of children’s impaired life-chances, in education, health, criminal justice, and economic contexts,” it added.

Extra £1.4bn cost to public purse

The study, which its authors said was the first to longitudinally track the relationship between child poverty and entry into the care system, drew on new datasets published by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC).

The research team’s modelling showed that within English local authorities, between 2015 and 2020, a 1% increase in child poverty was associated with an additional five children entering care per 100,000 population.

The report said the 10,356 additional children to have entered care was equivalent to 8.1% of the total number over that period, at an estimated total cost of £1.4bn.

Identical models showed that the same 1% increase in poverty rates would result in an extra 19 per 100,000 children being made subject to a child protection plan while an additional 52 per 100,000 began an episode of need.

Researchers estimated that between 2015 and 2020, 6.7% of all new child protection plans and 3.2% of episodes of need were due to rising child poverty.

They found that rates of child in need interventions linked less robustly to increases in poverty than higher-level actions.

‘Risk-averse child protection system’

“This raises concerns voiced elsewhere about an underfunded, risk-averse child protection system, increasingly focussed on acute interventions at the expense of prevention,” the study warned.

It also cited previous studies warning that social workers sometimes struggled to engage with poverty – characterised as the “wallpaper of practice” experienced by families they work with. In 2019, a British Association of Social Workers report urged social workers to focus on people’s socio-economic rights and do more to avoid stigmatising families.

“Local area policymakers may redouble efforts [to change things] by embedding poverty-informed policies in children’s services and multiagency partnerships,” the study said.

‘Tackling poverty key to managing rise in care population’

Lead researcher Davara Bennett, PhD student at Liverpool University, said: “We know that there is a relationship between poverty and care entry. But the nature of that relationship has remained the subject of some controversy, particularly in the UK. Our study presents evidence that rising child poverty is likely fuelling care entry and other statutory interventions in childhood.

“The message for policy is clear: poverty-alleviation is key to tackling the unsustainable and costly rise in the population of children in care. The good news is that child poverty is highly amenable to policy intervention. Merely restoring and extending the universal credit uplift and reversing cuts to welfare benefits, including the two-child limit and lowered benefit cap, would lift millions of children out of poverty, creating the conditions for better childhoods, and improving health outcomes across the lifecourse.

“The bad news is that, currently, welfare policy is considered outside the scope of the ongoing Independent Review of Children’s Social Care in England. Our research suggests that, without the wider scope, this potentially transformative review is unlikely to achieve its ambitious aims.”

‘Tendency to obscure trends in child poverty’

Nationally, rates of child poverty, defined by children living in households taking in less than 60% of the median income, rose from 17% in 2014 to 23% in 2020 before housing costs were factored in. After housing costs, 31% were in poverty in 2020.

Despite wider evidence linking families’ socioeconomic conditions to child welfare and child protection interventions, the report said poor-quality data and other related factors had hindered analysis in the UK.

“At national level, there has been a tendency to obscure the reality of trends in child poverty, and a reluctance to acknowledge the relationship between poverty and care entry,” the report said, adding that the government should set renewed child poverty targets and reversing the dozens of cuts made to benefits over the past decade.

‘Simply unacceptable’

In response to the research, Association of Directors of Children’s Services president Charlotte Ramsden said: “One in three children in England are living in poverty today, their experiences can often be overlooked and their voices go unheard. It means cold homes, overcrowding, hunger and stress which can lead to family breakdown. It means charities stepping in to fill the gaps left by the state and schools feeding pupils and their families over the summer.

“This is simply unacceptable. ADCS continues to call on government to implement a child poverty reduction strategy.”