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Fears that some British local authorities would forfeit their community care grants because of delays in preparing to implement new community care legislation appear to have receded. Several authorities, including Liverpool and the London Borough of Haringey, were understood to be struggling with requirements to form partnerships with health authorities and to produce joint written agreements for nursing care an discharge procedures when the legislation comes into force on Apr 1st, 1993.

Local authority social services departments' commitment to spending in the independent sector should extent to domiciliary care services as well as to residential care, according to Chief Inspector of the British Social Services Inspectorate Herbert Laming. He has called for SSDs to use some of the money transferred to community care budgets from social security to fund privately-run domiciliary care services. The private sector services, for their part, must give a clear idea of what they are able to provide.

Comments from a High Court judge in England on the powers sought by Nottinghamshire County Council Social Services Department (SSD) to protect a teenage girl from sexual abuse could be interpreted as seeking to prevent such powers, governed by section 8 of the Children Act 1989, from being used in the future. Mr Justice Ward protested at the SSD's refusal to pay for the girl's father to attend a sex offender clinic at a cost of 15,000 pounds sterling, but the SSD argues that its duty to protect the family was discharged by taking out an order barring the man from his home.

A survey of 347 poor families in the UK, carried out by the National Children's Home, reveals ever-increasing debt problems. Three-quarters of the families surveyed depended on income support and were forced to borrow money to pay debts, thus becoming trapped in a debt spiral. The survey results did not support the stereotype of the profligate poor. Welfare counsellinfg and financial advice often came only after the family's descent into debt and the survey report recommends the provision of more extensive and timelier welfare advice.

Two surveys, by First Key, an advisory organisation for care leavers, and the Campaign for the Homeless and Rootless (CHAR), reveal that local authorities in England and Wales are failing to fulfil their statutory duties towards young people leaving their care. The Children Act requires local authorities to develop written policies for meeting the needs of care leavers, to provide written guidance for care leavers themselves, and to provide practical and limited financial support as well as to liaise with other agencies to ensure, in particular, that 16- and 17-year-olds' housing needs are met.

The Warner inquiry into residential child care in the UK has revealed a picture of low morale and inadequate training amongst staff in homes which care for increasingly difficult children and young people. The report will recommend a coherent strategy for staff recruitment, training, appraisal and support, including personal development plans for staff and residents.

British local authorities have welcomed a new community care funding package but have complained that it does not go far enough. The government is to make 635 million pounds sterling available to fund the community care reforms to be implemented on Apr 1st, 1993. An additional 399 million pounds will also be earmarked for social security transfers for nursing and residential care in England in 1993-94. In return, the government will require local authorities to make full use of the voluntary and private sector providers so as to ensure a diversity of choice for service users.

Only one of the 20 social workers at Ashworth special hospital, Merseyside, UK is willing to speak out about aggressive nursing. Legal Director of MIND, Ian Bynoe says this is indicative of how specialist staff can become institutionalised. They do not think constructively and critically of the way they are doing their jobs. Allegations of abuse of patients resulted in an inquiry being ordered by the Health Secretary in Apr 1991. Susan Machin was the sole willing witness. She was badly hurt by a patient who had been provoked by the bullying that pervaded the hospital.

A frightening shortage of local authority placements for social work students has been revealed by a very exhaustive survey. Questionnaires were sent out to every one of the 116 social service departments and 146 social work training programmes in England and Wales and the response from both was more than 90%. It revealed that out of the 4,785 local authority placements needed by colleges from Sep 1992 only 2,663 were available, the shortfall being 2,122 or 44%. Child care placements were particularly short even though they were the ones most wanted by students.

London borough Barking and Dagenham is the only authority in England which failed to meet the Department of Health's deadline of Apr 1992 for publishing its care plan and is blaming a newly recruited manager for the failure. The manager, who took up his new post in Jan 1992, says that he quickly discovered that detailed work on the plan was still needed when he arrived, other authorities having prepared theirs much earlier. He was also given an initial method for the plan's preparation only to have it changed after several weeks. There are accusations that he is being used as a scapegoat for the council's inadequacies.

Deputy chief executive of the National Health Service (NHS) Andrew Foster says that social services managers must cooperate with each other to prepare for April 1993, when local authorities assume their new extended responsibilities from the NHS. Monitoring of the changes has indicated considerable confusion regarding the role of hospital workers, social service workers, general practitioners and others after the changeover. Local authorities will be studied by the Audit Commission regarding the value and cost of the services they will be procuring.

New health minister Brian Mawhinney is to concentrate all his efforts on the run up to the community care changes being implemented in Apr 1993, junior minister Tim Yeo handling other policies such as the Children Act and mental health. Mawhinney has started laying down a plan of action for the Department of Health for this busy period. He says it is not surprising that, of the 108 authorities in England, some have gone a long way along the implementation road and others are doing less well. He is considering monitoring at local levels to encourage the stragglers.

Health Minister Brian Mawhinney is talking of new measures to assist social service departments and health authorities in the introduction of the changes to care reforms due in Apr 1993. The new situation will mean social service departments taking over responsibility for residential community care presently handled by the Department of Health (DoH). He may well step up the DoH monitoring of individual departmental implementation. He is also thinking of a community care task force to oversee implementation and act where the changes were not being effectively introduced and to ensure agencies are developing joint strategies.

A General Social Services Council is to be introduced to regulate those practising social care and there is to be a three-month consultative process to set the foundation. The aim is to improve and maintain standards at a high level. Anyone working in social services will have to be on the register, and this will have four sets of criteria to include unqualified or inexperienced staff as well as the well trained professional. The eventual aim is that there will be two categories only, those who are qualified and those who are working so to be.

A General Social Services Council (GSSC) would have the power to bar unqualified and other undesirable workers from the UK social services profession and 95% of workers said they supported regulation of the profession by such a Council. The underlying purpose of the Council must be the protection of the public and 90% of those questioned believed that the GSSC should be given enough power to protect clients and improve the standing of social services. The proposed register would accommodate non-qualified staff for who long years of experience would stand instead of a qualification but 69% wanted the register only opened to qualified staff.

Nottinghamshire County Council's former deputy director of social services Barry Newell has advised the county to commence disciplinary action against a care worker accused of sexually abusing seven people with learning difficulties. He had been charged with rape and indecent assault in November 1991 over offences going back to 1986 but the charges were dropped when the Crown Prosecution Service decided the victims' disabilities would prevent them from being creditable witnesses in court. The accused worked at Wynhill Court mental handicap hospital in Bingham, UK.

There are around 9,000 people in the UK with both severe learning difficulties and challenging behaviour and there are ominous suggestions that many of these people are being drugged in order that they can be contained in residential settings. The parents of John Wain, 20, believe that ten years of anti-psychotic drugs have irreversibly changed his behaviour. He crawls now whereas he used to walk and dribbles badly. Side effects of drugs, including some normally prescribed for elderly people with insomnia, are not explained to parents or patients and they find this extremely worrying.

Independent research into the code for carrying out video interviews with children for use in court cases has revealed potential conflicts with the Children Act, implementation of the new procedures being required in Oct 1992 in accordance with the Criminal Justice Act. Problem areas include differences in working arrangements between social workers and police in different areas, lack of training, uncertainty over whether a child can be counselled prior to obtaining video evidence, and the importance being given to obtaining criminal evidence at the expense of the needs of the child. This last point is of extreme importance to social workers.

Pressure is to be put on the government to allow local authorities to make payments to clients for them to pay for their own care. At present there is a contradiction with government policy advocating giving choice to the clients of social services and then preventing them from buying their own services. A study by York University's social policy research unit shows that the Independent Living Fund, in existence since 1988, has indicated even severely disabled people can, with some guidance from professionals, make financial decisions on their own needs.

The General Social Services Council proposal to compile a register of social workers is to be circulated as a consultation paper in May 1992. It is hoped that the procedure could be ready in two years. The register is likely to begin with three categories to permit wide registration, and all qualified staff will be covered from national vocational qualification to Diploma in Social Work (DipSW) holders. Unqualified staff who have been working in the field for a long time will be able to register and new entrants will have to qualify within a period. Establishment of staff hierarchies will be avoided. There is some misgivings about staff being responsible both to their employers and to the Council.

David Townsend, social services director of Croydon, UK said that improvements were needed following criticism of the authority's mental health team over the killing of a six-month-old baby. Leonora Taylor, a former psychiatric patient, stabbed her daughter to death and was ordered to a mental hospital by a judge at the Old Bailey, London. The judge had said the professional workers were not to blame but Croydon's area child protection committee criticised health and social services. The social services being divided into separate adult and family sections meant the adult team looking after the mother ignored the implications of the child.

The care in the community reforms will need further development and introduction work after the April 1993 deadline, according to a circular from the UK Dept of Health (DoH). Purchasing and care management systems will have to be targets for the long term. The establishment of purchasing systems can require five years or more, according to Berkshire Social Services Dept (SSD) director, Anne Parker. However, preparation work for the reforms will be important over the coming 12 months. SSDs need to concentrate on establishing management and financial systems, and giving enough staff training, and providing information to the public. DoH-run pilot projects are also presented.

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