Louise Tickle recently
wrote a thoughtful and insightful piece in the Guardian about child protection
and adoption.
She is
absolutely right to draw attention to the impact of high caseloads and to point
out the effects of frequent changes of social worker on the quality of social work practice in
child protection and adoption. And she is absolutely right to bemoan the failure
by government to address the funding gap for children’s social care.
I also thought
that she made a telling point about the recent ministerial reshuffle, noting –
as I had done a few days earlier – that the post of children’s ‘minister’
appears to have been downgraded to that of Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State,
an office of which one incumbent (in Macmillan's 1957–1963 Conservative
government) is said to have commented: "No one who hasn't been a Parliamentary Under
Secretary of State has any conception of how unimportant a Parliamentary Under
Secretary of State is."
I don’t
understand why the children’s services trade press and other significant
commentators have not made more of this worrying relegation of the priority of
children’s services.
Talking of the
Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, it is hard today to miss in the
media accounts of his embarrassing attendance at the by-now infamous Presidents Club Charity Dinner.
What I find most
depressing about this story is not the allegations about the behaviour of some of
those who attended the event, shocking though those are.
Rather it is the
fact that the British establishment now seems to believe that it is acceptable
to fund essential children’s services (such as Great Ormond’s Street children’s
hospital) by relying on very rich men, and only very rich men, attending lavish
social events at which many of them appear intent on behaving badly.
I may be old
fashioned but I can’t see what was wrong with raising sufficient money through taxation.
