SOCIAL WORK
Volunteers
Jef Smith
The last stage of the Government's reshuffle, delayed for a week or two after the news of the major moves, is now accomplished with the appointment of Lord Colville as Minister of State at the Home Office. Lord Colville, a barrister specialising on planning work, takes over the responsibilities left by Lord Windlesham's transfer to the Irish Office. Among the areas the new minister is likely to spend time on are the group of topics, community development and race relations among them, that some critics feel would be more rationally located within the DHSS. Included with these is liaison with voluntary organisations, one more of the rather miscellaneous duties that fall to the Home Office. Lines of demarcation with Sir Keith Joseph's empire are far from clear. Earlier this year the DHSS mounted a major investigation into local authorities' relations with the voluntary sector almost simultaneously with the announcement that the whole question of voluntary effort was to be made a special responsibility of Lord Windlesham.
The job, whoever does it, is an important one. The Seebohm Committee with a brief limited to the statutory social services strongly recommend that an investigation should be carried out along similar lines in relation to the much more diverse field of voluntary bodies, but the non-gov ernmental organisations themselves, loosely co-ordinated through the National Council of Social Service and• an uneven network of similar local bodies, have looked very reluctant to seize the nettle of their own future. Their hesitation is understandable if unfortunate. Voluntary organisations are notoriously idiosyncratic bodies, each with its own objectives and structure, each operating with little formal reference to other organisations in related fields. Yet corporately the voluntary bodies are responsible for spending many millions of pounds of public money which comes into their hands either through donations or from governmental grants. It is part of the handed down wisdom of British social administration that our voluntary organisations are unique. It was Henry VII who discovered that, by giving certain middle-class citizens the title of Justice of the Peace, he could load on to them a number of tiresome administrative chores without expense. Glory rather than cash has remained a mainspring of voluntary effort, and though organisations are still being set up, the greatest and most glorious of non-statutory bodies in the field of social welfare were Victorian foundations. Some still carry the stamp of that supremely charitable age, and their continued existence though a period of increasing professionalism and state provision is testimony to their strength. Many of course are handsomely endowed, sometimes for objects it is now quite impossible to fulfil; others are victims of the fact that disbanding a voluntary organisation is very much less easy than setting it up. In practice the case for their remaining in operation depends on the arguments that they are uniquely capable of innovation, that they provide a necessary alternative to statutory welfare, and that their freedom from official control allows them to criticise constructively. How true are these claims?
Some organisations are clearly highly innovatory but others are deeply conservative; the pattern in fact is not much different from the variations between local authorities. Many of the most radical new departures in fields such as intermediate treatment, services for the disabled, and community work are in fact being explored within social services departments. Local authorities lead the field in staff training and are now active in research. Their shortcoming lies less in not carrying out experiments than in failing to give their experimental work sufficient publicity. A voluntary body, by contrast, needing for fund-raising purposes to bring its name constantly before the public, is much more eager to disseminate news of its work and even to present routine activities in an experimental light. Statutory bodies, it is true, are limited in their powers by statute, but many voluntary bodies are just as restricted by their constitutions, or by the unadventurous spirit of governing bodies.
The suggestion that clients need a choice of service and that this is provided through the voluntary movement flies in the face of Seebohm's ambition to create only one door for welfare. An arbitrary variety of services is much more likely to lead to client confusion than to genuine choice, and the coverage of the voluntary bodies is in any case patchy. In practice, many of the most professional voluntary bodies — most groups employ some paid officers — are finding it impossible effectively to compete for staff with social servies departments, which are able to offer higher salaries and much better career prospects. The fairly immediate result in some areas is that a voluntary body will offer an alternative but secondrate service to the arbitrarily selected group of clients it happens to accumulate.
It is certainly true that public bodies urgently need well informed critics able to take on the professionals on their own terms, but this is far from being a job that many voluntary organisations could ever fulfil. Most are limited by their charitable status from any very active involvement in the political process, and almost all are so dependent on local authorities and central government for financial support and cooperation over activities that they would find it impossible to mount a radical critique. The largest and strongest independent bodies, it should be remembered, frequently carry out sections of the local authorities' functions more or less on an agency basis.
This often has the effect of removing areas of operation from either professional scrutiny or democratic control. Is there not also something rather foolish and hypocritical about a council's delegating work in, say, the family planning field to an outside body which it then aids with a 100 per cent grant?
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