Introduction

At various points in post-war history, the recruitment of black and minority ethnic individuals into the social services workforce has received government sponsorship for a number of reasons: to address labour shortages, for symbolic and tokenistic imaging of public service agencies or for its transformatory potential. The bedrock assumption of this latter line of argument is that altering the racial composition of the social service workforce ensures that services would become more attuned and, therefore, more accessible to the ‘special needs’ of black service users and act as a counter to institutional racism. This strategy has steadily gained in momentum in public services in the post-Stephen Lawrence era, with a range of public bodies and agencies seeking to attract representation from minority ethnic individuals within their ranks. In many ways social work, like education, was at the forefront of this trend from the 1970s onwards, signalling the key role minority workers could play in the production of so called ‘ethnically sensitive’ service delivery (ADSS 1978).

The decade from the early 1980s can be identified as a significant period of ‘black recruitment’ in social work, when largely left-wing Labour-controlled local authorities sought to incorporate the welfare demands arising from grassroots minority ethnic communities and political activists and translate them into local government equal-opportunities policies. This was overtly the liberal settlement of a central state seeking to deflect a tense and unsettled period of race relations.