Introduction

Social work, as a profession, is closely associated with social justice and human rights (BASW, 2012). However, in Britain social workers, who overwhelmingly work within welfare agencies, are struggling with increasing policy prescription and welfare retrenchment and austerity – a situation that is likely to continue for decades (Amin-Smith et al, 2018) – and they feel their freedom to act professionally is increasingly restricted by intrusive management control (Munro & Liquid Personnel, 2015).

In the introduction to this book (Chapter 1), the editors highlight the central role of ethics in understanding social work's engagement with policy. Within the policy cycle, practitioner discretion at the point of implementation is a site where the tensions between policy compliance and resistance and challenge to policies are particularly marked (see also other chapters in Part III). In this chapter, I want to explore these tensions, and I will outline the context of the changing relationship between practitioners and public agencies in which they work; arguments that practitioners should put aside their own commitments in implementing policy in light of its democratic legitimacy; and arguments that practitioners have a professional responsibility to resist policy with which they disagree.

The development of social work and the development of the welfare state are closely linked (Evans & Keating, 2015). A continuing theme in this relationship is the role of social workers as practical policy actors, implementing welfare policies.

Policy actors in an increasingly strange land

In Britain, the role of social work crystallised in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Disparate welfare occupations were unified as a distinct profession. The new profession was housed in new dedicated social work (in Scotland) and social services (in England and Wales) departments in local government (Social Work (Scotland) Act 1968; The Local Authority Social Services Act 1970). These departments were infused with a professional social work culture and directed by senior officers with a professional background. They were bureaucracies in which practitioners were given leeway to make decisions about individual cases and develop the range and nature of service provision (Harris, 2003). However, in the last 30 years social work and public policy have fallen out of sorts. Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government tore the fabric of social policy within which the new unified social work profession had been formed (Hadley & Clough, 1996; Harris, 2008; Donovan et al, 2017).