Why tackling poverty is a priority for BASW | Julia Ross

Poverty matters. As a qualified social worker and member of BASW for over 50 years, I have known all my working life, that poverty has always been a feature of social work practice.

But over the last few years something has changed. Poverty has widened, deepened and I would argue, become more cyclical. Generation after generation of families now experience poverty, real grinding, distressing, endless poverty. The sort that makes you hungry, unhealthy, depressed and even more likely to die earlier. The evidence is all there in the and the most recent Joseph Roundtree Foundation UK Poverty 2023,Marmot Review: Build Back Fairer, The Broken Plate Report which includes BASW member, Dominic Watters.

Recently, Covid has had and still has a devastating impact. Only last weekend, the Spectator front page news was about ‘The Ghost Children’ – 140,000 pupils who never came back from lockdown – compared to 40,000 missing from school before. As a social worker, I am fearful of what has become of those children, as we all should be.

There are over 110,000 social workers across the UK. We have many duties in law: for example, children’s safeguarding and care, provision of foster carers, adoption, Family Courts, unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, mental health services, adult care services including but not only, hospital discharge and adult safeguarding. We are an essential part of the public sector, the safety net when all else fails.

In a recent survey of our members:

• Almost 70% said that they are working with more people living in poverty now than before the cost-of-living crisis;
• Over 70% said that they the people they worked with were being driven deeper into poverty as a consequence of the cost-of-living crisis;
• Almost 80% said that the cost-of-living crisis was causing additional problems for the people with whom they work; and
• Finally, 32%, like teachers, now support people directly from their own resources, which means digging into their own pockets.

I could go on.

That’s why as Chair I identified poverty as a key issue for BASW to prioritise.

We can’t fix poverty alone. That’s why I’m so pleased to welcome MPs and partners in anti-poverty organisations to our campaign. The NHS and other professions understand this too. Social workers are in a unique position to comment on the impact of poverty and policy on people who are most in need of support. We work with them every day and most usually within Local Authorities. This is why we want the Association of Directors of  Social Services, the Local Government Association and the Association of Directors of Childrens Services to join us in our campaign.

We have three ASKs, all of which are relatively modest but can make a huge difference to those who are struggling.

• To scrap the two-child benefit limit;
• To place a ban on evictions to protect people from soaring rents & homelessness
• To up-rate benefits in line with inflation

We had a quick win. The Government uprated benefits in line with inflation and so we replaced that with

• Extend the debt breathing space from 90 days to 180 days.

And we now see the possibility of the New Reform Bill 2023, protecting tenants from No Fault evictions and from raising rents more than once a year.

Poverty is a driving factor in people’s lives, generation after generation. The cycle  of broken families under huge stress, of missed opportunities and lost lives goes on. Interestingly, this was recognized by Sir Keith Joseph, a conservative MP, as far back as the 1970s in his book ‘The Cycles of Deprivation and indeed even earlier by Clement Attlee, Labour PM from 1945-1951, who was himself a social worker and social work lecturer.

We will play our part with social work intervention, and we will keep campaigning for the resources and interventions to truly tackle poverty. However, we, and the people we work with,  need us all to collaborate on this.

Join us in recognizing that ‘Social Work Stands Against Poverty’. Find out more about the campaign here.