"We all need access to warm housing"

Published by Professional Social Work magazine, 9 February 2023

We work alongside some of the most marginalised people in society. We also work with imperfect systems and structures. And for me, it's that interface of working with people in crisis and within poorly functioning systems that brings ethics and principles of morality to the fore. I think the honest truth is that social workers are fatigued, and that many in our communities are exhausted.

We've worked through a decade of austerity through a global pandemic, and now we have a cost of living crisis. Or perhaps, we might want to reframe that as a cost of surviving crisis. Our ability to grapple with complex ethical and moral concepts is really being tested and we're all feeling that in practice.

As a profession, we're co-dependent on the political and social landscape in which we practice. Our individual endeavour to support people is constrained as a wider political will to provide the essential structural components all people need to survive, and more importantly, that people need to thrive.

We all need access to warm housing, to healthy and nutritious food, to well-paid and secure employment. People's basic needs are not being met by society, and the impact of social work is hugely inhibited. We can work with compassion and with integrity and use our knowledge and our skills to support people, but we have to be honest about what we can and what we can't do.

We can't pay the heating bills for people this winter. We can't put food on the table for hungry families. And we can't control the impact of rampant inflation on all household budgets. But we still get up each morning go to work. We find a way to maintain a sense of positivity and hope. Hope that the future can be different. I think for me, the greatest moral injury and issue that I faced in my career is the impact of working in areas of deprivation where people are suffering deep poverty.

How often do we consider the very personal impact that this work can have on us as social workers? One of the biggest emotional challenges I face in my career is this juxtaposition between the life that I'm able to provide for my children and my home life, and the lives of the children of families that I'm tasked with supporting, many of whom are surviving poverty.

I was brought up in a low income family. Growing up money worries were etched into my everyday existence. So I went into social work thinking perhaps I'll be more resilient around these issues, that when I work with children and families experiencing hardship, I'd be able to relate to them.

I'm clear now after several years of practicing as a social worker, very little can prepare you for working in communities where poverty is rampant. I've been going into homes and seeing how people have to survive - it has a personal and emotional impact.

In areas like the north-east where I live and work half of the families of children under five are living in poverty, and in the area of the city where the social services office is located 60 per cent of children are living in poverty. That’s 18 children out of a class of 30. Children who are probably going without food, who may be cold and whose childhood has been cut short because life is so tough. Living and working in an area which has seen such a sharp decline in living standards, it does chip away at your sense of hope.

So how have I managed to continue working and navigating this moral injury? What strategies have I put in place and how am I able to help maintain a sense of positivity, despite the wider structure and political challenges that we face?

I've concluded that it's okay to be angry and as social workers I think we should be more visibly angry and speak out more. I think when we see injustice as society, we need to be funnelling that anger and frustration into action. I've done this a number of times in my career, and I've grown in confidence in challenging colleagues, senior leaders.

I made a point of increasing my understanding of issues of poverty and improving my social work practice in this area, increasing my understanding of welfare rights, and supporting families. I've collaborated with colleagues within the services that I've worked in, and I've had the confidence to speak to senior leaders and discuss issues of supporting children, and families in poverty. I always try to communicate with kindness and compassion. This really does help prevent any sort of confrontation, any issues of hierarchy.

I've also joined a lot of groups, and I think trade union activity, BASW branch activity, finding a safe spaces to offload to share those dilemmas and to manage the emotional toll of social work practice has been really important to me.

Social work is always going to involve working with people who are marginalised in society. I think we'll always need to navigate these complex ethical and moral issues. We're a political profession and require political solutions to deal with hardships and struggles. However, we can manage moral injury by listening to one another, supporting each other, and remaining grounded in the values that underpin our profession, using these as a guide in all that we do to think about human rights, social justice and anti-oppression.

Lewis Roberts is a children and families social worker in the northeast of England. The above was taken from a speech he delivered at the BASW England conference last year