Labour's social work champion: Emma Lewell-Buck MP, shadow children's minister
Derren Hayes
Tuesday, November 22, 2016
Derren Hayes talks to Emma Lewell-Buck MP, shadow children's minister.
Emma Lewell-Buck MP was appointed shadow minister for children and families in October. Lewell-Buck was first elected to parliament in 2013 when she won the South Shields seat vacated by David Miliband. In her time in parliament, the former child protection social worker has campaigned on food poverty and recently spearheaded Labour's opposition to controversial proposals to allow local authorities to be exempt from children's social care duties.
The ‘exemption clause' proposals in the Children and Social Work Bill were recently defeated in the House of Lords. Do you think the government will now drop them?
"It's an embarrassing defeat for the government, but I think it will reinstate the clauses when the bill comes back to the House of Commons after the third reading in the Lords on 23 November. That would be unwise considering the groundswell of opposition to it - almost every children's organisation is against this. It would be bloody-minded of the government to go down that route."
Why are you so concerned about the exemption clause proposals?
"When asked about what legislation it is that local authorities need to be exempted from, the government has come up with very few examples. One example is removing the independent reviewing officer oversight. But placements can change very quickly, so it would be dangerous to remove this.
It should also be based on robust evidence and consultation with the sector. I'm not seeing where that is coming from. It is a bill about children and social work, yet very few social workers have been consulted on it.
They have created legislation that no one wants, so it has to be a policy based on ideology, which is why I think it is privatisation through the back door."
When you were a social worker, were there times when you thought you could improve children's outcomes if free of certain duties?
"When I think back to when I was in practice and a local councillor, there is not a single time when I wished a piece of legislation was not there. I complained about bureaucracy, bad IT systems or not being taken seriously as an expert in court - they were the kinds of things that were prohibitive to practice."
Do you think the government is doing enough to champion social work?
"It is very rare that you hear the Secretary of State talking positively about the sector. There's no championing of social workers, no one who speaks about them in a positive way. I think a lot of that is down to it being an ‘add on' to the education brief. For example, there were no questions about social work in a recent education questions session in parliament. It has a second-class status.
I'd like to see the chief children's social worker be completely separate from the Department for Education - they should not be based in the DfE offices."
What lessons from your social work career have you brought to the shadow minister role?
"I understand the job and the territory, and know the organisations that work within the children's social care sector. I know what it feels like to be on the frontline and how tough it can be. I can also drill down into the issues and fight for change. So far, I've had good feedback from individual social workers."
What is the key challenge for children's social care services at the moment?
"We are not using the money we have in the right way. There's fragmentation of service provision which I think is dangerous. We are not getting uniform change and the picture is different in different areas. It is difficult for practitioners and families if they move from one area to another, and difficult for the government to monitor services.
Despite six years of change, nothing is improving or getting better."
Does Labour back the development of independent trusts to improve children's social care services?
"I've looked at a lot of trusts. The work they were doing was not bad, but they were doing nothing different to what the local authority had done. It was called something else, but was doing exactly the same.
It would have been better to deal with the fundamental problems of social workers. There are simple things that could be done to free social workers to do their jobs better. For example, if you bring a case to court, you need to bring bundles of reports. Surely a brief online chronology could be produced instead.
We need to put more faith in the profession and say we trust your judgment. If we make practice easier, then social workers can do their jobs better."
Is this why exemptions from existing legislative burdens are needed?
"None of the issues are about primary legislation. A lot of these things are in guidance or codes of practice. That's what a lot of social workers are worried about - primary legislation is not the thing that gets in the way of practice.
We have one of the safest child protection systems in the world - why would we want to get rid of that?"
Emma Lewell-Buck CV
- October 2016 - Appointed shadow children and families minister
- May 2013 - Elected to Parliament as the Labour MP for South Shields
- 2007 - Joined Sunderland City Council as a child protection social worker
- 2004 - Elected to South Tyneside Council
- Early 2000s - Studied politics and media studies at Northumbria University before gaining a masters in social work from Durham University