Tendring Topics……on line

Essex Social Workers

It would be a gross over-simplification to suggest that Social Workers are concerned only with those at the extreme ends of their lives…..with the very young and with the very old. However I have little doubt that it is with these two groups that they have most problems and find themselves spending most of their working time.

My own experience has, naturally enough, been with their concern for the old. When, at the age of eighty, my wife was discharged from Clacton Hospital disabled, after having fallen and broken a hip six or seven weeks earlier, I was her sole carer. I was eighty-three myself so I was mildly surprised, and perhaps a little relieved, that no Social Worker looked in to see how I was getting on, to find out what support I might need and to tell me what I was doing wrong.

I was sometimes having trouble parking my car in the road immediately outside my bungalow – and my driveway was much too narrow for me to get my wife’s wheelchair beside the passenger seat so that I could get her into and out of the car. I phoned social services asking if I could have a ‘disabled parking’ notice on the road. I already had a narrow driveway with a dropped kerb and it would be necessary only to extend the width of that vehicle access by two or three feet to achieve this. I expected to get a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ but instead I was told that my wife would have to be ‘assessed’ and that that would be done in about three months time!

It didn’t actually take quite as long as that. A very pleasant lady visited us with a form with lots of questions to answer (‘Can the patient feed herself unaided? was, I remember, one of them) and boxes to tick. I was told, as I could have been told over the phone two months earlier, that the County Council’s policy was not to provide a ‘disabled parking’ space where there was a dropped kerb and a driveway, however narrow and inadequate. They could concrete over my front garden to provide a parking space there if I wished. I didn’t. They could also make a concrete ramp to provide access for the wheel chair to my front door. I already had a perfectly satisfactory wooden ramp provided by a friendly, and very competent, neighbour. After a friendly chat the social worker departed – and that was that!

A couple of years later, after my wife’s sad death and following another phoned query, I too was assessed. Again, after a long wait, another, equally agreeable and eager-to-be-helpful lady called on me and we had a chat. It turned out that I had already provided for myself all the services that she would have been able to offer me. We parted with a warm handshake and, in her case I think, a sigh of relief.

My impression was that the County Council’s Social Services Department was able to offer valuable services to the old and disabled who needed them (I mustn’t forget that they are the source of my blue disabled-parking badge!). There are though, far too few social workers for them to be able to deal rapidly with people whose needs are brought to their attention, and to seek out those – whose cases may be even more urgent – about whom they have not been informed.

The same seems to apply at the other end of the age spectrum. Essex County Council has been repeatedly criticised by public service watchdogs for the standard of its child protection. An Ofsted report published last March described children’s safeguards in Essex as ‘inadequate’. A recent report in the Daily Gazette recorded that 1,000 Essex children who are on the ‘at risk’ register do not have a social worker looking after their interests. Bob Russell, Colchester’s MP is reported as saying ‘This is a failing of the officers at the highest level and the political leadership at the Essex County Council. They cannot hide behind the national shortage of social workers as the excuse’. It is clearly only by good luck that Essex has so far not made the national headlines with one of those tragic child neglect or abuse cases that attract national opprobrium and condemnation.

Perhaps the county council would do better if they concentrated on the boring old jobs with which they are charged by parliament, such as care of the young and the elderly, highway maintenance, refuse disposal, and education, even if that meant their members and senior staff spending a little less time jetting round the world, seeking customers for Essex manufactures in mainland China, running banks and post offices, and buying (with our money) advertising space for ‘Essex Apprenticeships’ on commercial tv.

One thing (just a coincidence I’m sure) that I have noticed is that whenever there is a news item that appears to cast credit on the County Council’s activities, a photo of the Council’s Leader, and a few of his wise words, appear in the press. Whenever there is criticism of the Council, some other previously little known face will be on the news pages, together with his apologies, excuses or explanations. On this occasion it was County Councillor Peter Martin, ‘responsible for children’s social services’.

Our Broken Society

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that my views don’t all that often coincide with those of the leader of the Parliamentary Opposition or of the leader writers of The Daily Mail and the Daily Express. I do agree with them though that in Britain today we are living in a ‘broken society’, and not all the reassuring statistics produced by the government and its supporters will convince me otherwise.

I see the signs of it every day both in tv news items and with my own eyes. There may be less reported crime (though that could be due to victims seeing little point in reporting it – or being scared to do so!) but there is certainly more binge drinking, hooliganism, teenage pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, vandalism, and, in schools, indiscipline and truancy, today than there was in the past*. It isn’t just the lure of ‘the telly’ that has reduced the number of Sunday evening church services, and weekday evening meetings of social and cultural clubs and associations. Many people (I am among them!) especially pedestrians and cyclists, are reluctant to venture out of their homes after dark. Others hesitate to respond to callers at their front door outside daylight hours.

Where I possibly disagree with Mr David Cameron and the popular press is on the causes and possible cure of our fractured and disintegrating society. I believe that it was in the ‘avaricious eighties’, the 'Thatcher years' that the rot set in. It was then that greed and avarice, disguised as ‘wealth creation’ became virtues, that ‘the nanny state’ was derided, the public services denigrated, and the super-rich became our role models and super-heroes. Everybody benefited, it was claimed, when the multi-millionaire made another couple of millions – because the wealth ‘trickled down’ to the rest of us. What rubbish!

‘New-Labour’, to its shame, did nothing to reverse that trend. Last week it was reported that in this country the gap between the incomes of the wealthiest and those of the poorest of our fellow citizens is wider today than it has been for forty years. For over a quarter of those forty years Britain has been ruled by a party founded for no other purpose than to secure social and economic justice for everybody! 'What shall it profit a man (or a political party) to gain the whole world – and lose his soul?'

Closing that yawning gap must be a first step taken toward mending our fractured society. It has been established beyond doubt that more equal societies have fewer and less serious social problems than widely unequal ones like our own; less crime, fewer broken homes, fewer illiterates, fewer teenage pregnancies, a lower infant mortality rate, smaller prison populations.

Those who yearn, as I do, for a fairer society are sometimes accused of being motivated by envy. That simply isn’t true. My income isn’t large, but then my needs are few. I don’t envy those who can buy yachts, mansions on the shores of the Mediterranean, and British football clubs. They’re welcome to them.

I don’t mind paying my share of taxation – in income tax, in VAT and in customs and excise duties. However, I do bitterly resent the fact that taxpayers on low incomes pay back to the state a much greater proportion of their incomes than do the seriously wealthy. In the forthcoming General Election I shall vote for any candidate whose Party, in power, would take serious steps toward narrowing that gap between the highest and the lowest incomes.

Helping the poor is not, on its own, enough. There is no gain without pain – and Britain’s less-than-wealthy have born that pain too long. Sharing it is overdue.

*Since writing the above I have read in the local press that for protection against vandalism and theft, Colchester’s Greenstead Public Library has had to install seven CCTV cameras and employ a fulltime guard!

A Royal Visit

The furore over the sale of Cadbury’s to the American firm Kraft reminds me of a story told me in the late 1940s by Jessie Adams, a Quaker lady in Ipswich, then well into her eighties. She had been among those present on 21st May 1919 when King George V and his consort Queen Mary had visited Bournville Model Village, designed and built by the Quaker Cadbury family to house the workers in their nearby chocolate factory.

It was decided that the Royal Party would visit one of the worker’s homes, which were shining examples of their kind. Formally dressed in top hats and frock coats, King George and George Cadbury walked in front while Queen Mary and Elizabeth Cadbury followed. Both ladies were known as being of strong character and forthright manner.

As the King and the Quaker were welcomed into the model home, Elizabeth Cadbury raised her voice and addressed her husband decisively, ‘Take your hat off George!’

Instantly and instinctively, King George’s hand went up to his hat!

The Inscrutable Chinese?

I have mentioned my grandson Chris and his Taiwanese girlfriend Ariel on a number of occasions in this blog. At the beginning of 2009 Chris was named as ‘Teacher of the Year’ by the Joy Organisation (educational providers) by whom he is employed. I thought that blog readers might like to see him with the children whom he taught during his first year with the school.


Chinese are often popularly described as being to ‘inscrutable’. To me, these children look anything but that. They look remarkably similar to any group of European kids of the same age – and every bit as cheeky and mischievous! I particularly like the shy little girl right at the back who almost didn’t make it into the picture. I am assured though that, unlike some British kids, they are obedient and eager to learn. Teaching them is a pleasure.