In 2009 alone an additional two million people contacted the social services.

Longer-term citizens needing continuous care rose to nearly 1.4 million.
Seven out of ten UK residents receiving such continuous care are old people.
Not only is this clearly where the system cannot cope now, there is no chance whatsoever that former Health Secretary Alan Johnson’s bogus scheme to treat people at home could ever work, be staffed, or afforded – as nby predicted in 2008. (Aged Care workers have been asking since then what happened to the promised ‘new’ £15billion. The answer is, it was never there – and half of it wasn’t new anyway).

In respect of waiting times for new clients aged 65 or more, two thirds of clients had to wait two weeks or longer just to be assessed.

The state of the UK’s care-home offering in both the private and public sectors is a disgrace. But the sheer mountain of dissembling hypocrisy by local councils and this Government beggars belief. And given the scale of cost involved in employing social workers in the public sector – the majority of whom are loathed and avoided by private care workers – it is important to pose the question: is it value for money?

There are just over 100,000 social workers in the UK. That works out to almost exactly 35 cases per worker per year – a fraction of the gp/patient ratio, and well within the ability of workers in private service industries. Although averages can be misleading, we are talking here about each social work employee having to deal with new or updated cases every then days.

The level of employment involved is substantial. In some areas now (like Waltham Forest) 1 in 8 of the women employed in that area are social workers. In Scotland, there are four times more social workers than there are police.

But on visiting the social workers’ own website, one finds quite a bit of barrel-scraping going on in the search to justify this investment. Research carried out by the Journal of Social Workers proclaims that violent deaths in the UK ‘plummeted’ by 36% between 1975 and 2005. But the raw numbers show that just 52 such deaths a year (out of 3.5 million case histories) were avoided.

This assumes that social workers were entirely responsible for that total – which I and most social scientists would reject as laughable. And against this anyway has to be set the obvious failure among child-based cases to either spot or predict a never-ending stream of media reports of appalling torture, murder and abuse carried out by dysfunctional parents ‘under’ the surveillance of social workers. The Slog and its predecessor have also, of course, exposed many cases of controlling social workers when it comes to the childcare sector.

For decades now, the assumption has been that anyone questioning the efficacy of monies spent on social services must be to the Right of Genghis Khan. The Government’s way of further cementing this erroneous belief is to employ its own high-profile luvvies like Joan Bakewell – who did a great job to raise awareness of mistreatment of the old, but never laid any blame at all where it belongs: in the Cabinet hypocrisy that promised much, and did absolutely nothing.