Eric Pickles: disconnected and not caring for carers

Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government Eric Pickles has a mantra: councils do not need to cut frontline services. Instead, they should cut senior managers and back-office staff, and join up services with neighbouring councils.

There is indeed waste in local government, and opportunities for improvement — including the removal of staff whose attitudes have not kept pace with changes in politics, society, working practices and technology. But Mr Pickles' position conflates back-office functions with waste, when in fact local authorities need back-office staff in order to ensure and continuously improve effective, efficient and value-for-money practice on the frontline.

If he believes social workers have time to stay abreast of policy and practice developments, develop new processes, obtain Member agreement to them, reconfigure electronic social care record systems, calculate departmental performance and tender for services, he must be fortunate enough never to have needed support from one.

Regular government strategies, action plans and advice notes create public trends for Health and Social Care to respond to. Stroke care was recently prominent; it is now being displaced in public interest by dementia and Autistic Spectrum Disorders. Support for Carers is a trend that emerged a few years ago and appears to have stuck — it was a popular campaign feature during the 2010 election, perhaps because most people have direct or indirect experience of caring.

Carers save the economy £78 billion a year. Recognising this, most councils now support carers independently of the person they care for, through assessments, information, advice, support plans and services, while also funding carer-specific voluntary organisations. These developments do not simply drop into frontline practice. They require someone to take the lead: reshaping the way Social Services works, monitoring practice, improving quality, managing grant funding and ensuring organisational awareness.

A worrying trend across Social Services is the abolition of dedicated Carers Lead posts. As these roles are cut, responsibility for carers is being fragmented across multiple posts or added as an extra to already heavy portfolios. In some cases this may work, but in the main it is likely to stall or reverse local support for carers — despite the Coalition identifying carers as 'the first line of prevention'.

Mr Pickles may present the back office and the frontline as separate; he may be sufficiently removed from the day-to-day reality of public service to believe it. But the cutting of back-office posts is directly impacting frontline staff and the people they work with. As time passes, that impact will only become more pronounced.