2. Personal Social Services in Britain

There is no clear or coherent category of “personal social services”, which cover both social work and “social care”, services to people which fall outside the remit of health services. In Britain, these departments have developed as a residual category of services not provided by other services.

After 1948, three departments were responsible for personal social services:

● health departments, responsible for public health and various aspects of social care;

● welfare departments, responsible for residential care and help to elderly and disabled people;

● Children’s departments, responsible for child care.

In the 1960s they were unified into Social Work Departments in Scotland, and Social Services Departments in England and Wales. This gave the impetus to social work as a generic profession, though genericism is increasingly rare in practice.

Although much of the spending on social services went on residential care, the SSDs（Social Service Departments）, and professional social work, were dominated by child care. The balance was shifted by the introduction of community care policies in the 1990s, following the Griffiths report of 1988. Since then there has also been a movement towards integrating children’s services, combining personal social services for children with education departments, and services are now being planned jointly. Recent reforms in centralgovernment have divided out responsibilities further. Community care is principally within the Department of Health; children’s services within the Department for Education, formerly the Department for Children, Schools and Families; and criminal justice is within the Ministry of Justice.

2.1　Child Care Policy

The Children’s Departments in 1948 were founded in part in response to a child care scandal. Under the 1948 Children Act, it became the duty of a local authority to “receive the child into care” in cases of abuse or neglect. Local authorities gained powers to investigate neglect in 1952, and to take preventative action only in 1963. The problems of children who were deprived or abused have been connected closely with issues concerning young offenders. The Children and Young Persons Act 1969 sought to remove any distinction between young offenders and children who had been abused or neglected. The 1989 Children Act represents an important break with this philosophy, and removed the provisions which made it possible to admit a child to care for committing an offence.

The grounds on which a care order can be made are defined in England and Wales in the Children Act 1989. The basis for admission to care has to be the welfare of the child, taking into account his or her needs, wishes and family background. In order to be admitted to care, a child should be suffering or at risk of “significant harm”, which is defined as “ill-treatment or the impairment of health or development”, or should be beyond parental control.

The Maria Colwell case, in the 1970s, showed deficiencies in the new professional arrangements, and child care practice became increasingly defensive. In the early 1980s, pressure for “parental rights” increased. The 1989 Act, while rejecting this view, limited the circumstances under which children could be taken into care, and the numbers of children admitted to care has fallen substantially.

2.2　Community Care Policy

When Social Services Departments were formed, the intention was to co-ordinate their activities as far as possible with health services. The Griffiths report on Community Care, published in 1988, proposed a different kind of arrangement. Rather than depending on co-ordination and integration of services, there should be one service with clearly defined responsibility, which would commission services from others. This function, in the case of community care, would be performed by Social Services Departments （Social WorkDepartments in Scotland）. Each budget would be redirected to come under the SSD’s control. In principle, the role of social services departments would be the purchasing of care from a range of providers. The departments were to develop the range of provision they need by making contracts with providers for services. Care managers were to be responsible for allocating resources and setting priorities; practitioners would assess individual cases and guide the selection for each person.

Although the government announced that Griffiths would be implemented, the reform of community care stopped short of this. Care management in practice is unlikely to be devolved close to the practitioner level; there are not multiple purchasers, but one main purchaser—the Social Services Department; and there is much more emphasis on co-ordination than on choice and the market. The systems which have been put in place seem at first blush to have more in common with the planning of the 70s than with market ideology, and in practice emphasis on co-ordinated activity with other services has increased rather than diminished. Current indications are that the services have become disorganised and demoralised.

2.3　Services to Criminal Justice

There are significant differences in the system of criminal justice in England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Scotland has its own legal system.

Most offenders in the U.K. are dealt with by non-custodial sentences. Custodial sentences for indictable offences by adults account for less than one sentence in five, while fines cover more than a third of all offences. About a fifth are given intermediate sentences like probation or community service. The Probation Service （in England and Wales） administers supervision in the community, social work in prisons and after-care. For most of the last hundred years, their duty has been to “advise, assist and befriend” offenders. Since 2001, these objectives have been replaced by aims which have more to do with community based punishment: the service is intended

● to protect the public

● to reduce offending

● to provide for the punishment of offenders

● to ensure that offenders are aware of the effects of crime, and

● to rehabilitate offenders.

The equivalent service in Scotland is still situated in social work with criminal justice.

The welfare approach has been most prominent in the treatment of young offenders. From1963 until 1989 it was policy to treat young offenders as needing care, but since 1989 there has been a renewed emphasis on penal policy. The age of criminal responsibility is not uniform throughout the U.K.; in England and Wales it is 10. Custodial options for young people include detention centres （14-21）, attendance centres （10-21） and youth custody （15+）. A range of non-custodial activities are undertaken by Social Services Departments, intended partly to rehabilitate young offenders, and partly as “diversion”, intended to postpone the point at which young offenders incur custodial sentences.