Listen to thisI am, generally, not a fan of fly-on-the-wall television documentaries, especially when they focus in on social welfare issues. There have been two significant examples of this genre in the UK in recent months, however, that can’t be ignored. One, ‘The Scheme’ followed the lifestyles of a select few characters and families in a rundown housing scheme in the West of Scotland. ‘Poverty porn’ it was dubbed, and there is no doubt that it laid bare the lives and vices of its chosen characters for the simultaneous repulsion and titillation of the viewing public. However, having taken my usual ‘I’m not watching that nonsense’ stand, one evening, I did.
It took me unawares, just came on as ‘The News’ finished and drew me in. And, actually, for all its obvious sensationalism, it proved pretty unsettling viewing, exposing the real inequality gap between the characters in ‘The Scheme’ and people like us, people like me, who can too easily assume a vaguely liberal view of social matters without having to confront society’s casualties in the raw, in our own living rooms.
The other documentary, I didn’t see, and for that reason I’d usually be wary about commenting on it. But I’m going to nonetheless. It involved an undercover film crew posing as staff members in a home for adults with learning difficulties. Those who have seen the programme report awful behaviour on the part of care staff. It has, understandably caused something of a media and political storm. Not having seen the programme I won’t dwell on its specifics, but for me this case brings into sharp relief, the entire political agenda in respect of care services, not just for adults with learning difficulties but across the board, including children’s homes and schools.
Care in the UK is perhaps more regulated than in any other country in the world. Under a banner of modernization and improvement each of the countries in the UK introduced legislation to regulate care. We have care standards, we have inspections, we have a registered workforce; it is claimed that we have, or ought to have by now, a confident, competent workforce; this type of scandal isn’t meant to happen.
Our infrastructure to regulate care, and the rhetoric that goes alongside it, needs to be deconstructed. It came about at a time when the political thrust was towards privatizing and market-wising care. Erstwhile aspirations for a professionally qualified workforce were dropped, and in their place was put a minimalist and reductionist system of vocational qualifications. We have lost sight of any notion of what care might be; it has been reduced to a time and motion exercise. Moral purpose and professional judgment are subsumed beneath ever-expanding checklists. In child care, too, a need to account for work done has led to an overload of unnecessary and intrusive recording, which ironically, gets in the way of staff doing the real work: hanging out with children.
It is hard to hold onto any calling to care that one might have once had in a climate, when the pressure is to complete a series of largely mundane and measurable tasks.
In many places the low value placed on care translates, too, to a monetary undervaluing. Many care staff are often on minimum or minimal wages. Care homes are, thus, staffed by those who struggle to gain employment anywhere else. As soon as they manage to find an alternative they do so, with the result that the care workforce is an often transient one. As a consequence, relationships are low trust and instrumental. When a carer has so many beds to make and toilets to clean and, moreover, has to record that he or she has done so, then a child or adult with learning or behavioural difficulties whogoes into a strop becomes a real problem – they get in the way of task completion! And, with minimal training on such issues and in the absence of a stable and containing staff culture then such strops are taken as personal threats or challenges. A power struggle ensues, instructions become demands, demands become threats and these threats have to be seen through. Thus we get to the stage where the very kind of abusive behaviours exposed in the documentary can come about.
These undervalued, arguably oppressed, workforces are presided over by an army of regulators and inspectors. It has been a deliberate strategy to reduce costs; ditch the need for professional qualifications, present care as being attractive to the market and maintain a rhetoric of ‘quality’ and ‘quality assurance’ through an expanding regulatory apparatus. But this compliance regime hasn’t worked. This latest scandal is but the latest example of care not being amenable to technical regulation. Talk of competent confident workforces begins to sound a bit empty.
My fear is that the political response to the realization that regulation hasn’t worked will be to impose yet more regulation. It seems to be the political way: the rules aren’t working, we need more and better rules. That would merely compound the problem.
Regulation hasn’t worked because it is the wrong kind of regulation; it is what Bill Jordan (2010) calls contractual rather than moral regulation. Contractual regulation believes that “care” can be set down in a series of standards, registration requirements, service level agreements and external monitoring of these. This elaborate infrastructure does not lead to improvement but actually gets in the way of care that might be rooted in any deeper moral purpose. The sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman argues that when we surround care with ever more rules and regulations we dissipate the moral purpose that draws people to care in the first place. We redefine the task as a technical rather than a moral one. Defining care as primarily technical gets carers off the hook of moral regulation that demands that they relate to those they care for on the basis of a shared humanity. This calls for a very different kind of political and professional culture.
References
Bauman, Z. (2000) ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’, European Journal of Social Work, 3, no 1, pp 5-11.
Jordan, B (2010) Why the Third Way Failed, Bristol: Policy Press.
