BASW prepares to make Treasury representations
The statement to the UK Parliament will provide a clearer picture of the government’s economic plans following the recent King’s Speech, with many speculating that there will be a strong focus on revenue raising measures, including tax changes.
Most of the decisions made in the Autumn Statement relate to areas that affect England-only, given Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have devolved administrations that make spending decisions in their own nations. The devolved administrations receive block grants from the UK Government that fund most of their spending and allow them to put forward their own budgets.
BASW will make a written submission to the Treasury outlining where we want to see the Chancellor prioritise spending. Our asks will be come from our General Election Manifesto, which will include:
- Significant investment within and beyond local authorities in England to ensure social work can fulfil its crucial role in community recovery and public health planning.
- A social work workforce strategy in England that includes a comprehensive review of pay, terms, and working conditions for social workers and a nationwide recruitment campaign funded by central government
- Scrap the two-child limit and benefit cap across the UK
- Reform social work student bursaries in England, including unfreezing the level of support being made available through bursary funding
- Continue to uprate benefits in line with inflation UK-wide
- Increase the non-taxable mileage allowance rate to 60p a mile UK-wide to encourage employers to raise their approved mileage allowance payments for social workers and social care staff
- Match the £2.6billion funding for children’s social care in England that was set out in the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, with consideration also made to any funding lost because of cuts to local authority children’s services during the years of austerity. Plus, adequately fund foster and residential care, kinship care and wider care services to move away from an overreliance on private care services.
You can read our full manifesto here.
Ultimately, the UK Government must put forward ambitious plans to tackle poverty, improve working conditions, resource social care with long term funding, and invest in our public services.
While we acknowledge that Ministers have to make difficult decisions given the fiscal uncertainty of the country, we maintain that the challenges our profession and society faces run deep and will therefore require bold and incisive leadership to address.
It is more cost-effective to spend now on early intervention, prevention, and tackling workforce recruitment and retention issues than to end up spending more on crisis interventions and seeking to redress an emerging workforce predicament that could be avoided.
This is the case we will continue to make to newly elected Ministers.
