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THE MAYOR, ALDERMEN AND COUNCILLORS OF THE LONDON BOROUGH OF WALTHAM
FOREST
Mr. Mayor, Ladies and Gentlemen,
I have the honour to present my report for the year 1970, the sixth year since the creation
of the new London Borough.
As one looks forward to the great tasks still ahead for the development of the Health
Services and for the building of the Social Services in their new structure headed by the Director,
one may perhaps take some pleasure in reviewing the achievements of the Waltham Forest Council
in this field since 1965. Up and down the Borough there are new buildings - health centres, homes,
hostels, day centres for all types of need — the numbers of field workers in the Social Services
have increased to four times the 1965 figure. In every field of Health and of Welfare progress has
been made, in many cases great progress; in others patient groundwork has been laid.
The year began with a pause in progress and some regression, but then came the opening of
the Essex Hall Old People's Home, Grosvenor House School for the Severely Subnormal and the St.
James Health Centre - all three advances not only in the quantity of the Borough's contribution
but significant landmarks in new thinking as to the very nature of the services which a local
authority should provide. In the estimates prepared at the end of the year came the foreshadowing
of the largest increase in social workers we have ever had in one year,together with other advances
From the administrative point of view, the department was in great difficulty because of the
illness and then retirement of the Chief Welfare Officer, coupled with the prolonged illness of the
Senior Medical Officer for Child Health, all this at a time when re-organisation was in the air but
impossible to implement due to difficulties in appointing the Director of Social Services. So for a
year, direction, supervision, and staff support almost disappeared at the most senior levels, all
effort going to keeping the services running at all.
A single phrase in an annual report may hit the headlines, sometimes embarrassingly so,
and in a number of fields desirable objectives appear which flicker into popularity and become
unexpected priorities only to be overtaken later by others. It is particularly in such areas that
triennial changes of party control leave officers a little breathless. But the broad road of progress
is not so fickle and the needs for which the Social Services exist are accepted by all, if ill-defined
at the edges; nor are they one iota different for changes in the department to whom field workers
owe their loyalties, or the route by which the public purse finances these departments.
It is therefore familiar matters which it is my duty to keep before the Council, all the more
important because they are always with us.
The field of Health in which the Local Authority has the most to offer — the environment —
has traditionally been, and is now of key importance. Local Authorities have done more to prevent
illness and promote health by building and engineering works than the so-called health services
(almost entirely illness services in fact) have ever done. The link between the new Health Services
and the Local Authorities, not yet clear at the time of writing, must be an organic functioning one,
clear for all to see, or the process of setting up the expected new pattern of Health Services will
indeed be mutilating.
So much lies in the Local Authority's hands to do.
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