http://speye.wordpress.com/2013/11/01/know...-children-away/This is a copy of a letter from an english housing authority, with some comment on the legal position in England. Although the issue is housing the social workers are involved and that is why I have put this here. And what I want to draw attention to is that this is not a new problem: in fact it is a problem which I thought we had solved many years ago.
Let me outline a situation for you, which I was involved in a long time ago.
There was a young woman who had been brought up in care. She had no family support, and her baby's father was not around after the baby was born. She was dependent on benefits and she was not a financial genius. She had a council flat which was ok, but she did not manage her money well and her life was a bit chaotic. She fell into rent arrears and so she was evicted.
The legislation covering this field is complicated. It stems back to the 1977 Housing (Homeless Persons) Act and that act has been superseded several times since it was passed: but the basic concepts remain in force in England, I think and so it is still relevant to talk about them now.
That act made a distinction between intentional and unintentional homelessness. That is the first thing that strikes you as odd if you are a normal human being: it takes a curious kind of mentality to think that people wake up in the morning and decide " I really don't like having a roof over my head. Think I'll get rid of it". It fits with the narrative of feckless and manipulative scroungers because the mischief it was designed to address was those people who just refuse to pay their housing costs and so wind up on the street. Those people are not be helped to find alternative accommodation, naturally. We really need such a distinction because there are millions of them, and they wilfully refuse other ways of dealing with the problem, no matter what you do. Not.
Anyway that is what the Act did, and so if you were deemed intentionally homeless you had no right to assistance at all.
For those who were not intentionally homeless the local authority had some duties: they had to provide you with advice and assistance to find alternative accommodation. In practice that meant they gave you a list of private letting agents and told you to get on with it. They might also give you temporary accommodation (for about two weeks) while you were looking.
However there was a further test and that is whether you were in "priority need". The conditions which qualified you for that status vary between the nations in the UK, but at the core they are what you would expect: you qualify if you have dependent children, or are pregnant; if you are mentally ill, or physically disabled, or elderly, or have left a care home relatively recently. You get the picture.
So in order to have a right to housing you had to be homeless through no fault of your own and you also had to be in one of the "vulnerable" groups.
The young woman I am using as illustration fell at the first hurdle. The local authority took the view that eviction for rent arrears automatically meant you were intentionally homeless and so they said they had no responsibility for her or her child in terms of housing. This was very common at the time. Obviously it is still common in England, judging from the letter I have linked, or if it is not common this is back to the future.
In the case I am using for illustration the next step, again common at the time and replicated in the linked letter, was to refer the case to the social work department. The child was at risk and so the housing department took the view that this was a matter for child welfare agencies. Shamefully, this often resulted in the child being taken into care (see also the film I linked on another thread, called Cathy Come Home).
In this particular case I was fortunate to be working in a sensible social work department, and when I refused to remove the child they backed me. This was legally problematic too, because the Social Work (Scotland) Act is a little contradictory in the obligations it places on social workers: on the one hand it requires that we keep families together whenever possible; and on the other it requires that we keep children safe. In these circumstances conventional wisdom was that the fact of homelessness meant it was not practical to keep the family together
and to keep the child safe: and welfare of the child is trumps. So in face of an obstinate housing authority there was considered to be no alternative to taking the child into care and that is what happened if negotiations failed.
Unlike many social workers I am very keen on law, and this case is one of a few which brought me to that conclusion. Because the reason I could refuse to take that child into care is this: the social work legislation does not mention the social work department at all: it mentions the local authority. Social workers work for the local authority: but housing departments also work for the local authority (though housing associations do not). In the past most social housing was owned and administered by the local authority. That changed post 1980, for reasons unrelated to this aspect, but, as ever, our crazy privatisers do not actually want their pals to be responsible for the fall out: and so the local authorities, deprived of money and houses and everything else which makes it possible, retained the ultimate responsibility for housing the homeless (this is paralleled by their obligation to find placements for children who have to come into care, and care home places for the elderly who need them and on and on: but that is by the by).
It followed that the obligation to keep families together where possible applied to the housing department as much as to the social work department: and they could do it. There was then an argument to be had about whether it was in the child's interest to stay with a mother who had put him in that situation in the first place. That rather depends on what you see as the cause of her failure: but we did not need to go there. Because at that time it was possible to ask the benefits agency for something called "rent direct": and if the claimant did not ask for it, it was also possible for the benefits agency to impose it if it could be shown to be in the interests of the family. Rent direct meant that the rent went straight to the landlord and the claimant only got benefit net of that sum. It is interesting to note that that became the norm when housing benefit was introduced: and that it is to be reversed under the government's "reforms".
To cut to the chase, there was then a shameful episode of brinksmanship between me and my department, and the housing officer and his department. They set a date to put the woman and child out on the street and we refused to take the baby into care. Just before we all trotted off to court they caved in and gave her a flat. They did not want to set a precedent, I suspect.
I was not alone in this: social workers across the country were fed up being used in this way: fed up with punishing the poor and vulnerable for reasons unrelated to what we conceive to be our job. And the issue came up again and again and eventually they just stopped doing it. Or so I thought.
Understand, this was horrible. It felt like using a baby as a pawn in a wider battle and we all lost a lot of sleep over it. But that is what the policy relied on: that I, and those like me, would not in the end risk having a baby out on the street in November. It is the tension between social workers' focus on the individual client, and wider policies which lead to those dilemmas in the first place. The usual, in fact. We are not supposed to involve ourselves in that type of action nowadays: it is "political", and that is verboten.
Yet here we are again.
