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In recent years, ‘social care’ has been used as a term encompassing not only its traditional meaning of the practical functions provided by personal social services, but also the professional function, primarily that of social work (Macdonald, 2000). It is this broad meaning of the term that will be utilised in this chapter scrutinising the expressed intentions of New Labour policy for social care. I will make both an intrinsic analysis of these intentions and an extrinsic critique of their social care policy. There is much detail to be evaluated in New Labour’s social care policy targets and this chapter will focus on some of the key areas. A broad critique suggests that, where targets are explicit, they have proved of limited value in judging action against intention, and where they are less explicit, or more qualitative, it is hard to match outcome to original intention. In addition, many policy intentions are comparatively new and not embedded into practice sufficiently to provide evidence for evaluation.

The areas of social care policy that were mentioned in New Labour’s Manifesto commitments (Labour Party, 1997) provide little to evaluate. The relevant 177 Manifesto commitments relate to:

• long-term care (100 and 101);

• reduction in time from arrest to court disposal for persistent young offenders (68);

• the introduction of child protection orders (73);

• the duty on local councils to protect the homeless (92);

• comprehensive civil rights for disabled people (147).

These add up to six pledges upon which to cast judgement (see Table 9.1). Many of New Labour’s social care changes have come through other developments, such as the move from Compulsory Competitive Tendering (CCT) to BestValue (see Chapter Three of this volume).

In Britain, ruling politicians have constructed a system that is rhetorically defined as choice and control, but which, in reality, is far from that. Resistance to this system is essential for radical social work because the EasyCare model constructs a system that is outside of the values, traditions, and ethos of professional social work. This chapter discusses the positive alternatives to the defensive practice required of (in particular) local-authority-based social workers. It approaches radical resistance and positive radical practice based on Radical social work. The chapter examines the main themes from the book and brings them into the contemporary context, including individualism, social workers making alliances with new movements, radical social work as a critique of the history of the welfare state, the persistence of poverty, cultural diversity, social-work education, community work, and educating the public about the social-work role. It advocates examples of radical practice for today, including ideas for action that are feasible in most organisations where social workers are employed and in which students carry out their practice learning.

From a lukewarm beginning, New Labour’s social care policy has come to the boil, with the changes introduced symbolic of their ambiguous approach to public policy – full of rhetoric on individual empowerment, but relentless in the unshackling of private capital to develop services. This chapter looks at what, and how much, has changed in social care over the Blair years. It considers whether policy development reflects modernisation as conceptualised by 6 and Peck (2004), and evaluates the order of change, if any, from Conservative social policy using the Hall (1993) model. The law relating to social care has always been different in England and Wales from that of Scotland and Northern Ireland, but devolution has made changes in the social care arena in the four countries which have not always been congruent. These differences need to be acknowledged, and some are addressed.

The above two practice examples describe two very different types of problems, but both will be familiar to social workers and to students on placement. The first practice example is likely to be the most familiar to social workers working in the statutory services, and could easily be transferred from this mental health setting to work with children and families, or to social work with adults. Many social workers in these settings find planning their work difficult when they are buffeted by the acute problems that hit them and their colleagues every morning when they get in to work. This first practice example highlights a common social work practice where social workers are faced with responding to ‘emergency’ or ‘crisis’ situations versus a practice that attempts to meet the needs of individuals in order to prevent emergencies or crises from happening. As is common in emergency or crisis situations, it may well have been that the service user Hasan went to visit at the GP office was already known to social services, but may not have been eligible to receive services due to falling below the Fair Access to Care Services (FACS) eligibility threshold. When service users fall below this threshold, often called non-FACS, they are not considered to be service users ‘in most need’, and therefore they and the community around them go on experiencing increasing difficulties until they reach a point such that their problems and difficulties are so severe the local authorities must accept the individuals as recipients of their service.

Many of the theories and methods that social workers use in practice require or encourage the consideration of the community in various ways. For example, systems approaches require an assessment of the interactions and interconnections between a service user and her or his interpersonal relationships, community and environment (Pincus and Minahan, 1973, 1977). A strengths perspective requires an assessment of strengths and resources on individual, interpersonal, community and environmental levels (Saleebey, 2009). Empowerment approaches require an assessment of a service user’s power and participation at the individual, interpersonal and societal levels with intervention strategies taking place in one or more of these systems to combat blocked resources and to enable service users to possess power and control in these areas that will contribute to positive growth and development (Greene et al, 2005). Finally, social constructionism holds that a service user’s reality and way of viewing the world is not formed in isolation but is shaped and influenced by her or his culture and the society in which she or he lives (Greene and Lee, 2002). As illustrated, the concept of community and the consideration of its influence on service users is not an aspect that is ignored or taken lightly in social work, but rather is something that is interwoven into several aspects of the profession. This chapter provides an overview of the core theories, values and critical concepts that serve as the foundation to social work in the community. We start with an exploration of systems approaches followed by the theories and approaches of social constructionism, the strengths perspective and empowerment.

There is a long and strong tradition of considering ‘community’ in social work (Midgley, 1995; Payne, 2005; Stepney and Popple, 2008), and it is a tradition that made a reappearance from the late 1990s (Stepney and Popple, 2008) after a period of about 20 years in the wilderness. From 1979 until 1997 a Conservative government in the UK (it was much the same with other right-wing governments elsewhere in the world at the time) demonstrated an ideological resistance to the notion of community. This is reflected in the famous quotation from Margaret Thatcher while Prime Minister in the UK, ‘There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families’ (Thatcher, 1987). Although the New Labour government that came to power in 1997 largely continued Thatcherite policies in a number of areas of social welfare policy (Baldwin, 2002, 2008), as a government they did harbour a greater interest in the concept of community. At the time of writing this book, the current Coalition government is enhancing the focus on community through their discussions and promotions of the ‘Big Society’ and ‘localism’ agendas, which aims to give more power and control to local communities. The increasing emergence of community, particularly through policy agendas, has had an influence in the academic and policy worlds by reintroducing an interest in an exploration of the importance of community as theory and practice. We believe community is a concept that has some purchase for people in their everyday lives and is, therefore, regardless of the views of government, likely to re-emerge as a viable way of understanding diverse worlds.

In the previous chapter we looked briefly at the history and development of some of the key models and methods for working with communities. In this and the following two chapters we aim to look in more detail at three of these methods so that we can learn what might be useful, appropriate and effective as forms of practice for contemporary social work in a range of settings. We also want to see what might be more effective practice if we, as social workers, want to make a difference in people’s lives. There is evidence (Jones, 2005) that social workers are not happy with the kind of practice foisted on them by managerialist organisations, which are more concerned with managing resources than facilitating imaginative, creative professional practice. We look at the knowledge, skills and values of these approaches in specific relation to the above two practice examples. This chapter looks at community social work, as envisaged by the Barclay Report (Barclay, 1982) and built on in a number of pilot projects since.

We begin by looking in some detail at the definition and actual practice of community social work, focusing primarily on practice implications. We then revisit the two practice examples and address the consequences of using this model of practice for Jenny and Hasan as practitioners. Finally, we note the additional implications for professional social work practice in contemporary social work organisations.

The two illustrative examples of Jenny and Hasan are from a more individual or casework tradition in social work.

We now turn to community development, a term that covers a range of different practices. In Chapter Three we looked at a partial history of community development and its links to social work, and this chapter focuses on the practice implications of this approach to social work in the community. Having established some of the areas of practice that are relevant to students or professional social workers, we return to Hasan and Jenny to see how the knowledge, skills and values of community development might assist them in working with service users in their settings.

Community development does, as we say, cover a range of practices, but we only focus on those areas that are of relevance to social workers working in community settings. There are different modes of community development we need to address, some of which reflect a top-down approach to policy implementation (Midgley and Livermore, 2005), as with The World Bank’s authoritarian and neoliberal version of community development or the New Labour Action Zone projects of the 1990s, while others are a bottom-up approach, as with the CDPs of the 1970s in the UK, when practitioners took control of the project agenda (Stepney and Popple, 2008).We can also look at community development as seeking consensus between stakeholders in community affairs (Roberts-DeGennaro and Mizrahi, 2005; Ohmer and DeMasi, 2009), or as conflictual, where the community, with professional support, takes on the powerful forces that maintain communities in their state of poverty or marginalisation (Alinsky, 1971; Gilchrist, 2004; Midgley and Livermore, 2005; Reisch, 2005; Mayo, 2009).

The practice example from Chapter One (see pp 1-2) illustrates a complex situation for Irene as a social worker upholding the importance of diversity, inclusion and anti-oppressive practice yet acknowledging that the services provided to the community are not actually adhering to these values. Irene realises that the operations and delivery of services might actually only meet the needs of a particular subgroup of the community, which overshadows the needs of the community as a whole. She is faced with the task of soliciting the needs of the community as a whole, versus just a few, in order to maximise the services of the Sure Start centre and to truly make the centre a service that meets the needs of the community as defined by the community. A community profile is one approach to social work practice in the community that Irene could use to accomplish this task.

In a general sense, social workers are often employed to work with ‘communities of need’, or groups of individuals who share a similar situation or common experience (Twelvetrees, 2008). Communities of need could be comprised of people with disabilities, older people, LGBT individuals, individuals with alcohol or drug dependencies, mental health issues or people from minority ethnic backgrounds. Such communities are often defined as ‘in need’ as they may experience discrimination and/or oppression from the dominant society and may be excluded from access to resources, public or social services or power over themselves and within their communities (Twelvetrees, 2008). The challenge for social workers often lies in determining the actual need of the communities in which they work, particularly as their ‘needs’ are often defined by government officials, academics, service providers or others who have some sense of power and control over the communities.

As discussed in previous chapters, the concept of community can be defined in several ways, such as, in regard to an administrative area or a group of individuals with a shared interest or characteristic. A community can be perceived as a geographical area, with visible and established boundaries, such as villages or large cities, or as functional communities, such as those that share a specific concern or identity (Weil, 2005). Both geographical and functional communities participate in communication, interaction and exchange information and resources through an exchange process. Often communities are visualised as our proximally close neighbours, our close networks of friends and colleagues, or the group of individuals that share a common interest or characteristics, all of which are relatively small in nature and easily accessible. What is missing from this perspective of community is the fact that communities can actually exist along a continuum, from local to global (Gamble and Weil, 2010). Individuals can identify with their local neighbours, such as those who reside on the same housing estate, with a national group that share a common interest, such as the British Association of Social Workers (BASW), and even with international groups that act as a community in order to address global issues, such as the Fair Trade Organization or human rights organisations.

This chapter explores the concept of global community by describing the social work theories and methods that support this way of working as well as the concepts of social justice and globalisation. It then turns to two related types of global community work practice that occur at the global level – sustainable development and progressive change – and concludes with the global role of civil society and non-governmental organisations.