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SOCIAL SERVICES
Miss F. K. Wells, Principal Welfare Officer, reports as follows:
The social work services were not able to develop and
progress during 1969 as had been hoped, following the major
changes the previous year and the gradual build-up of confidence
and security among staff arising from the success of these
changes.
1968 had seen the reorganisation of the social work in the
department into area teams. This had later been strongly recommended
by the Seebohm Report, whose main recommendations
were later still largely incorporated into the 1970 Local Authority
Social Services Act. So Havering, with a handful of other local
authorities, had forecast and brought about a number of difficult
internal staffing changes which all other authorities had still to
plan.
Unlike many other authorities, too, Havering run their
residential welfare services within their main social work administration.
This avoids a situation where dual services — residential
and domiciliary—tend to go their separate ways, with
separate standards, and separate attitudes towards training and
the improvement of working skills.
The factor preventing the social work services promoting
themselves at last within the local community, thus helping more
people more effectively, and also discovering in greater detail
than before their greatest needs, so helping the authority to plan
priorities with more knowledge of the real facts, was the damping
down of resources. It became impossible to increase staff by so
much as a single welfare assistant. Yet all the time the work
increased. New cases came in almost as fast as before, in spite
of no real promotion of any social work service for nearly five
years. The staff often had to discontinue their contact with
former cases much earlier than was helpful, in order to attend to
new ones. But still numbers accumulated, and during 1969, 1364
new cases were opened, 1091 being closed. Further information
on these new cases is given below.
The feeling of staff that they were under such intense
pressure that they were not being able to help those they were
in touch with as well as they should was confirmed objectively
by figures produced by the Department of Health and Social
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