The quality of social services in the UK

The violent death of ‘Baby P’ has sparked a heated debate on the quality of social services in this country: despite 60 visits from social workers over the course of one-and-a-half years, Haringey Council authorities failed to remove the 17-month-old baby from his violent mother and her partner and place him in good care. After the baby’s horrific death, the whole tragedy came to light and an entire country is shocked at the unimaginable degree of violence and torture the little boy had to endure in his short life. Emotions run high in cases like this one, and calls for ministers, local Council authorities and social workers to resign, and entire departments to be reorganised are loud and frequent.

This sad case raises more general questions about the quality of public services, and surely proves a bit of a dilemma for the Labour government. After all, to improve public services had been the top priority on their agenda when they took power more than ten years ago. Today, many people are wondering to what extent the performance of the public sector has improved. Some defend Labour’s record passionately, in particular in times when approval ratings for the government have hit a new low, and point out that Labour bashing on public services failures is nothing but populist talk. After all, the government can demonstrate that public spending has risen significantly and argue that things have changed for the better. But just how much? This seems difficult to say, given that everybody feels so strongly about this issue.

It’s time to bring some clarity to this matter and have a look at the facts and figures. I log on to IBSS and search for ‘Public services’ as a general keyword and ‘United Kingdom’ as the geographic term. The number of hits is well above 1,500 and thus unmanageable, so I refine my search further. First of all, I’m setting a limit to papers that have been published in the past five years. It seems fair to assume that any political change will need some time to reflect in actual outcomes. Plus, ‘Public Services’ might be a bit too broad – I opt for ‘Social services’ instead, as this is the particular issue that has made the news for the past two days. However, still this gives me roughly 1,000 records. A quick glance at the first 20 or so show that they are spot-on. In ‘The lives of foster carers: private sacrifices, public restrictions’ (Journal of Social Policy, 37:3 (2008), L Nutt and G Gillespie examine the regulatory and institutional issues foster carers face. In ‘Contracting out employment services to the third and private sectors: a critique’ (Critical Social Policy 28:2 (2008), S Davies argues that there is actually little evidence that the outsourcing of services to the private sector in recent years significantly boosted the efficiency of service provision. MJ Moseley focuses on rural areas and asks what are the likely changes that the countryside will see in terms of general care provided in the years to come (‘The future of services in rural England: the drivers of change and a scenario for 2015’, Progress in Planning 69:3 (2008)).

IBSS allows me to limit my search further by simply clicking on a list of related search terms, so I limit this set of records further down to articles that specifically revolve around ‘Social work’. This gives me a digestible number of 192 records – all about social services in the UK published in the past five years! Including the search term ‘Performance’ yields more quantitative research, and if I wanted to, I could limit the search even further to keywords like ‘Public Administration’, ‘Health Services’ etc. With regard to ‘Child care’, C Day and H Davies call attention to the success of newly established outreach clinics for children (‘The effectiveness and quality of routine child and adolescent mental health care outreach clinics’, British Journal of Clinical Psychology 45:4 (2006)).

The overall picture is anything but straightforward. Just reading through a small sample of the vast number of papers that have been published on this issue shows how tricky it is to arrive at an overall nation-wide assessment. Plus, there is the issue of methodology. In ‘Performance measurement in social care: a comparison of efficiency measurement methods’, P Clarkson and D Challis (Social Policy and Society, 5:4 (2006)) are right to point out just how terribly difficult it is to find the right method to actually evaluate performance levels. They emphasise how important targets and measurement have become these days but remind us how the results are, of course, contingent on the methods chosen, and argue for closely monitoring the methods used. It seems difficult to come to a final conclusion on this matter. Public spending on social services has increased substantially and it is safe to assume that this results in better performance to some extent. To what extent precisely is notoriously difficult to say. Perhaps sometimes actual figures and ‘hard facts’ are difficult to match with people’s highly subjective perception of what they think the true levels of quality are. The saddening case of ‘Baby P’ shows how deeply concerned people are about the provision of social services – surely, this issue will play a decisive role in the next parliamentary elections!