Introduction

Social work has rarely been short on ambition. Now, with the major structural constraints that have been building on it, it demands serious re-evaluation if it is to have a real chance of serving the liberatory and social justice-based goals associated with it by progressive practitioners and theoreticians. That is the issue we want to explore in this chapter. Specifically, we want to explore it through the lens of user and carer involvement because we think that it both has been at the heart of the most progressive recent developments in social work and also offers particularly helpful insights if we want to challenge the reactionary neoliberal pressures that have been increasingly acting on social work, both statutory and non-statutory.

Social work's conflicted history

The shift to the right in mainstream formal politics and the emergence of service user movements have been parallel developments in the UK and beyond since the 1970s. Both put an emphasis on user/ consumer involvement, although, as we shall see, there have been deep differences in service system and service user understandings of these. Equally important, both can be seen as a reaction to the top-down, state-led politics and social policy that, in the context of social work, was epitomised by the creation of social services departments in 1971 following the publication of the Seebohm Report in 1968. Harris has described these departments as ‘Seebohm factories’, degenerating into ‘neoliberal production lines’ during the second decade of the 21st century (Harris, 2019). Originally privileging children and family social work, because this was the most professionalised area of activity at the time, social services departments provided a new home for social work in large, formalised, hierarchical bureaucracies where workers were mostly women and senior managers mostly men. It has been a difficult inheritance to throw off.

Equally problematic for such state social work were the claims that were made for it by its advocates: that it could offer major solutions to increasingly evident problems of poverty. As an essentially individualised service, still largely based on psychodynamic theory, it clearly could not make serious inroads into the structural problems that it faced, creating a legacy of perceived inadequacy and political distrust through over-claiming.