I have been looking more into the demise of The College of Social Work (TCSW). A lot of details are made clear in a good article in Community Care.
But I went a bit further including tracking down the
organisation’s annual report and accounts on the Charity Commission website.
You don’t have to be a financial wizard to see just how
vulnerable the organisation was to the government pulling the plug. In the year
ending 31st March 2014, total expenditure was approximately £1.87m
while income (other than government grants) amounted to only £0.66m, nearly all
of which was from membership fees. It doesn’t take a lot of analysis to see
that in order for the college to be self-supporting (i.e. without depending on
government grants of £1.2m or future government contracts) the income from
membership would have to increase more than 2.8 times, an eye-watering amount
and probably an unbridgeable gap.
For an organisation that only earned £0.66m it was
optimistic (to say the least) to incur annual expenditure of nearly £1m in
staffing costs and a further £190,000 in renting an office in London’s West
End. Exactly what the departments of Health and Education thought they were
playing at in allowing the college to get chest deep into that kind of
expenditure, when they knew that future grant aid or contracts could not be
assured, beggars belief. It is almost as if the poor old college was invited to
bite of more than it could chew.
Some might conclude that the moral of the story is not to
get into hock to sharks. My thought is that I cannot imagine how the college of
social work could ever have been an independent voice of social work if its
financial structure meant that at any moment the government could shut it down
just by refusing to sign a check. No true professional association could allow
itself to be in such a craven position. And members of the college would never
have had an independent voice so long as the indebtedness or contractual
dependence persisted.
Talking of contracts most, if not all, of the commentators
seem to assume that there was nothing particularly topsy-turvy with the college
bidding to develop and administer the process of assessing social workers for
the Approved Child and Family Practitioner award, a contract which has now
controversially been awarded by the government to Morning Lane Associates.
But it seems to me that a college of social work – if it was
ever to aspire to the heights of the medical royal colleges – should have been
doing precisely the opposite, i.e. developing its own standards and
qualifications not implementing crude bureaucratic pass/fail tests conceived by
faceless civil servants and government ministers. Oh well, it’s probably all soon
to become forgotten history, water under the bridge as they say.
Before leaving this nest of vipers I must comment on the
news breaking this morning that Camila Batmanghelidjh is to leave the children’s
charity Kids Company, following what
seems to have been an ultimatum by the Cabinet Office that either she went or
the charity would receive no more contracts from the Government.
It seems to be another case of a charity reliant on
government contracts being told to get into line. The Guardian article quotes Camila as saying that the government is
playing “ugly games”. Apparently she believes that Kids Company, which previously enjoyed close relations with the
government, blotted its copybook last autumn, when it launched the See the Child campaign that was highly
critical of the UK’s child protection system.
The Guardian
article quotes a Whitehall source as saying that the See the Child campaign
Respect indeed!
We – all of us – should be concerned with protecting
children, and how to do that best, not doffing our hats to government ministers
and Whitehall officials and showing feigned respect. Camila Batmanghelidjh has
always been prepared to tell it like it is. The government should respect that,
not seek to neutralise her.
But sadly, all too often, he who pays the piper calls the
tune.
