Introduction

Social workers generally come into the profession wanting to make a difference in people's lives. They may be motivated to use their advantages to improve the wellbeing of those they see as less fortunate than themselves (social worker as helper) or by a sense of social justice and desire to change the world (Payne, 2005). The third part of Malcolm Payne's (2005) model for understanding social work is social work as control of resources. I have never met anyone who came into the profession with the latter as their inspiration or aspiration.

Despite this, we are living in a world where social workers are mainly engaged in resource control. In adult care, services have been reduced to a minimum available for people whose needs have reached ‘substantial’ or ‘critical’ on the eligibility criteria (DH, 2002; Henwood and Hudson, 2008). Anything else which people require will have to be paid for, or provided by relatives. This creates a two-tier system in which those who can pay for services will receive them before their circumstances reach eligibility requirements. For those who cannot afford to pay for services, there is the depressing wait for the moment when personal, family or community resources finally give out and they are required to go cap-in-hand for whatever services are available in their area. Their own individual crisis is not prevented and they are not in a position to make use of the twin policy imperatives of New Labour's Transformation agenda – choice and control. This has, in anecdotal terms, been referred to as the EasyCare model, with a nod towards low-cost airlines that reduce services to the minimum and charge for extras.

Radicalism is mostly associated with resistance to authoritarian imposition or discrimination and this has been the case with radical social work as long as there have been people with a critical perspective on social work (Powell, 2001; Ferguson and Woodward, 2009). One of the key areas of resistance at the moment is the imposition of market driven approaches to the delivery of social care services (Ferguson et al, 2005; Ferguson, 2008a). This is the political context in which ruling politicians have constructed a system which is rhetorically defined as choice and control, but, in reality is far from that.