‘Their house is squalor, but they’ve got a 50-inch Brighthouse TV’

Social workers in Wales are still blaming parents for what they see as poor lifestyle choices despite the promotion of anti-poverty practice, researchers have found.

CASCADE, the Children's Social Care Research and Development Centre in Cardiff, examined how social workers in two local authority teams in Wales responded to poverty.

In recent years a link has been made between inequality and child welfare intervention rates. 

The resulting "social gradient" - where a step increase in deprivation is matched by increases in rates of child protection procedures – has been found to be steepest in Wales.

A child living in the ten per cent most deprived neighbourhoods in Wales is on average 12 times more likely to become 'looked after' than those living in the least deprived areas, according to research carried out in 2017.

The CASCADE team set out to find out how social workers take account of poverty in their daily practice, conducting fieldwork between September 2019 and November 2020. Methods were revised to take account of the impact on the research of the pandemic.

The team made practice observations, conducted interviews, and mapped decision-making processes, finding "some evidence... of narratives that emphasised the cultural, rather than material, aspect of poverty, and blamed parents for making inappropriate spending choices.

"Poverty alleviation was generally seen as outside of social workers' control and requiring earlier help before social services involvement."

The team reflected on how the link between child poverty and entry into the care system has led to poverty-awareness initiatives including the BASW Anti-Poverty Practice Guide for Social Work.

This drive, the authors note, should have had a positive effect, resulting in “increased awareness of socio-economic circumstances as a practice issue”.

But they found negative perceptions of poverty and blaming narratives persist in Welsh social work, adding: "...whilst we observed many examples of poverty-aware practice, which may or may not be attributable to the attention focused on child welfare inequalities in recent years, many of the negative examples… were still present. These included blaming narratives and the ‘othering’ of families with which they worked."

Welsh social workers were found to make generalisations about the neighbourhoods in which they worked and the people who lived there.

One said: “There's a lot of ingrained generational poverty... grandfathers haven't worked, and grandmothers haven't worked, that's created fathers and mothers that don't work which are creating children that don't work."

Blaming of parents for the conditions in which families lived was evident. One social worker said: "In this area I’ve noticed there's a huge issue with immediate gratification… they’re buying things through Brighthouse and then that’s how there's massive financial issues…”

Another said: "The thing is they all say they’re struggling with their finances… they’ve got the best Kappa tracksuit and new trainers… Their house is squalor, but they’ve got a 50-inch Brighthouse TV."

Pointing to recent trends in practice the authors note: "It has been argued that social work practice has become overly focused on individualistic approaches that firmly locates risks and support needs within families, with scrutiny of parental behaviour, but little attention paid to structural factors and the environments within which families live."

The team found varying attitudes to poverty across the two authority areas: “[In one location] the social workers talked about the way the local authority had adopted strengths-based approaches to practice, which had a central focus on the family context. 

“This contrasts with examples of practice more rooted in neo-liberal ideas of locating blame for problems within individuals and households, irrespective of the wider societal context of families.”

Social workers seemed aware of the relationship between poverty and other factors impacting on the ability to parent but needed prompting to draw these out.

The researchers conclude in their British Journal of Social Work published paper: “Years of austerity have both impacted the resources available to some families to parent effectively and on local authorities’ ability to respond to families’ needs for additional support. These things have happened at a time where the drivers of social work practice have been increasingly risk focused.”

They point to the move towards "more humane practice with families, which places the needs of families within their wider socio-economic context, rather than the perceived narrow focus on risk located within the home".