A history of the Personal Social Services in England. Feast, Famine and the Future - R. Jones (2020). A history of the Personal Social Services in England. Feast, Famine and the Future. (2020). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Paperback, ISBN 978-3-030-46123-2. £24.99. Aus $45.02 plus postage. 494 pages.

Abstract

The author of this book is, Ray Jones, Emeritus Professor of Social Work, Kingston University. Jones was formerly the Director of Social Services for Wiltshire, Chief Executive of the Social Care Institute for Excellence, Deputy Chair of the British Association of Social Workers, and in 2018 he was awarded Social Worker of the year for his outstanding contribution to social work. In this book, Jones displays an encyclopaedic knowledge of the local authority personal social services (PSS) and the unified profession of social work, prior to and after, the passing of the Local Authority and Allied Personal Social Service Act (1970) that created these services in the UK. Also on display, is a profound knowledge of the political and legislative processes that have shaped these services across the last 50 years. Jones maps the changing government structures, including the abolition of some organisational forms and the creation of new forms, some of which had a short life. Alongside these observations, he interweaves commentary about the legislation that has impacted on the work of Social Service departments, such as the Mental Capacity Act (2005) and the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act (1970). Given Jones’s remarkable service management and educational career, this book is both a personal history, a history of the evolution of the PSS and an organisational and political history of considerable merit. It is also a book so full of detail that all this review can give the reader is snippets of information in the hope that they will go further and read the book in full. The book is made up of 5 sections and 13 chapters. Part 1 is Creating the Personal Social Services. Part 2 is the Personal Social Services in Action. Part 3 is New Laws and New Horizons. Part 4 is the Recent Reforms and Unravelling. And finally, Part 5 is Reflecting and Re-routing. The process by which each chapter was established involved not only the researching key documents that recorded the debates in committeemeetings but also interviews with 33 well-known people who were prominent in these debates. The interviews are extensively reported throughout the book. The four chapters that make up section 1 are Seizing the Moment: The Seebohm Committee, Scripting the Future: The Seebohm Committee and Preparing the Platform: The Local Authority Social Services Bill and Act. This section explores the events that led up to the establishment of the Seebohm Committee as well as the committee’s activities and the debate following publication in 1968 of their report. On display is the argument for the Probation Service staying outside the proposed Local Authority Social Service Department structure. Also, on display are the arguments put forward by the existing Local Authority Departments of Health who argued that social work and welfare services as envisaged by the Seebohm committee should be subsumed under these departments and not be located in a new Department of Social Services. The Probation Service remained a separate service primarily as a service to the Courts and the legal system, although there were some later changes. The push by local authority medical personnel for responsibility for Seebohm services did not gain favour, and the Local Authority and Allied Personal Social Service Bill was presented to Parliament and became law in 1970. This is Jones’s era of “feast”. A startling suggestion in chapter 3 of this book is that “The Seebohm report can be seen as the missing chapter of the 1942 Beveridge report” (p. 46). If true, the Seebohm report may be the final fling at addressing the five “wants” (health, housing, education, employment and income) that were the focus of the Beveridge report. When published, the Beveridge report represented a consensus that supported and inspired the Beveridge legislation, a consensus that has since fallen away. This may also be why in 2020 the PSS are, as we shall see later, unravelling. Part 2, the PSS in Action consists of four chapters –Creating the Empire: Promise and Potential (1970–1976); The Seismic Shifts in the mid-1970s; Norming and Storming: Social Work Debates and Developments in the 1970s and Thatcher and Threat (1979–1989). The first of the chapters provides a detailed account of how in one year, 174 newDirectors of Social Service were recruited. On 1 April 1971, of the 136 Directors appointed, only 53 were qualified social workers. It is worth commenting at this point, on how the Seebohm Report called for the establishment of Departments of Social Services not Departments of Social Work, even though local authorities had disciplinary based Departments of, for example, Education or Borough engineers for whom a university disciplinary degree was a required qualification. The implications for Social Work of the Seebohm Social Service PSS nomenclature will be explored later. The next chapter, the “Seismic Shifts in the mid-1970s”, deals with the impact of the Maria Colwell Inquiry into children’s services that moved from the Home Office and became part of the unified local authority PSS. This inquiry changed the children’s services focus on working with disadvantaged children and families, to one of “rescue” and removal of children from parental care. This is a focus that remains today and one which is well articulated by Leigh (2017) in relation to the culture of present-day child protection services and by Burns et al. (2017) in relation to child removal by the state. This is a change which echoed loudly in Australia. Another influence that took the children’s service sector in this direction was Kempe et al’s. (1962) “Battered child” © The Author 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press Children Australia