Abstract
Three decades of neoliberalism led to the banking/financial crisis of 2007/08, the ensuing Great Recession and subsequent Coalition and Tory UK governments’ obsession with austerity. Ian Cummins’ book examines the effects of all this on social work and wider welfare provision in the UK. Individuals, families and councils have been – and remain – on the receiving end of austerity policies, not least welfare cuts, with expenditure on local authority children’s services drastically reduced and an ongoing financial crisis in adult social care. The government narrative, that councils need to do more with less, results in practitioners unduly focussing on rationing services and risk management bureaucracy.
The foreword by Guy Shennan, chair of the British Association of Social Workers 2014–18, notes the impact of poverty on the people who practitioners work with. Thereafter the book includes an introduction, conclusion and six chapters covering: social work under neoliberalism and austerity; class, poverty and inequality; advanced marginality and stigma; welfare and punishment under neoliberalism; poverty, inequality and contemporary social work; and reimagining a social state. All have something interesting and important to say.
The contributions of Bourdieu and Wacquant are used by Cummins to examine the development of neoliberal ideas and their impact on social welfare. Neoliberalism’s two key tenets – the supremacy of the market in ensuring the distribution of resources and a belief in liberty, freedom from state or other interference – and the whole economic and political neoliberal project are critiqued. Bourdieu stresses, for example, the ongoing importance of class in neoliberal times even though its influence might have decreased in wider social discourse. Wacquant argues that changes in economic, welfare and social policy have led to the ‘criminalisation of poverty’; it is a shift from ‘the War on Poverty to a War on the Poor’ (p. 73).
One of the results of neoliberalism is the negative impact on social work notably in the form of ‘new public management’. This introduced elements of the market, such as competition, into public services and a managerial controlled audit culture involving key performance indicators, targets and associated bureaucracy. All of this resulting in an attack on social workers’ professional autonomy (see also Garrett, 2018).
As for austerity, the Coalition government introduced a deficit reduction programme which amounted to the biggest cut in state spending since the Second World War. Consequences include the loss of hundreds of thousands of public sector jobs and cuts to public services and benefits. There have also been falling incomes and rising costs of living for many as poverty and inequality have increased. Despite Coalition forecasts, austerity continues and could last well into the next decade.
As for neoliberalism’s and austerity’s impact on social work, Cummins explores this in relation to three client/service user areas. First, practice with children and families increasingly amounts to little more than ensuring there are no immediate child protection concerns, with cases being quickly closed without any support being offered because of lack of resources. Second, the plight of asylum seekers and refugees is increasingly conflated with crime and terrorism, with practitioners having to operate within harsh policy constraints and an increasingly hostile public debate about this. Third, concerning mental health social work, there might have been advances in that the recovery model has become established in terms of service provision – people can and do recover from serious mental health problems – but a real danger is that the measure of recovery can be too sympathetic to neoliberalism’s key tropes (also see Ferguson, 2017).
Cummins rightly calls for a return to a focus on relational and community approaches to practice, something which I recently called for (Rogowski, 2018). For instance, in relation to children and families, practice should eschew a model geared to crisis intervention/child protection and, instead, might recognise the value of community social work where practitioners are based in local communities with children and families treated as both individuals and members of the neighbourhood (Featherstone et al., 2018). Moreover, a different child protection narrative is required, one that acknowledges the impact of poverty and inequality on children and families and interrogates their causes and consequences.
In sum, this timely book deals with some of the most pressing issues facing social work today. Poverty, Inequality and Social Work might not always adopt an overtly radical/critical stance, but it remains an important text that should appeal to students and practitioners alike.