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This chapter explains how a care discourse was elaborated within the Swedish welfare state with universal rights for the care of citizens. It focuses on the care of older people, a matter of social and political importance because of the ageing population and the complex difficulties within welfare of balancing services and expenditure. The social care discourse of the Swedish model evolved in an era of universal welfare solutions distributed by the public sector, with the state as the conductor and the municipalities determining and distributing services as the providers. Legally, questions concerning older people came under the Poor Laws, a situation that persisted until the Social Services Act came into force in 1980. Since then, service is the overall terminology for the satisfaction of social and personal needs, services, and care.

Barbara Kahan spent a long time in the world of child welfare. Her professional lifespan coincided with many major developments for disadvantaged and deprived children. As a local authority practitioner, senior civil servant, writer, and campaigner, Kahan was always at the forefront. She won a state scholarship to the University of Cambridge in 1939, a development that changed her life. In 1943, Kahan was assigned as a government inspector of factories in the Midlands. From newspapers, she learnt about the campaign of Lady Allen of Hurtwood to improve the lives of deprived children. Kahan read and wept over the Curtis Report. She was determined to work among such children and applied for the newly created post of children's officer for Dudley. By the late 1960s, Kahan was a national figure within child-care circles. She played important roles in a committee chaired by Frederic Seebohm to consider what changes were necessary to ensure an effective family service, and in the passage of the Local Authority Social Services Act of 1970.

The ‘right to know’ was cited by Frederic Seebohm as a persistent example of a series of what he considered to be the social ills of his time. Seebohm's remarks are of interest not simply because they follow the popular emotional currents that flowed around the death of Maria Colwell, but because Seebohm could claim to have designed the structure of social services that was judged to have failed her. At least some of the ‘frustration, anxiety and stress’ facing social workers in the early part of 1973 arose out of the major structural changes that had been introduced by the Local Authority Social Services Act of 1970. Since the early 1950s, welfare services for children in the United Kingdom had largely been delivered through the children's departments of local authorities that had been established by the Children Act of 1948. Political pressure for change in the structure and organisation of welfare services grew through the early years of the 1960s. This chapter also looks at social work, Sir Keith Joseph, and the ‘cycle of deprivation’.

The chapter summarises the development of the idea of social work as a profession and describes the negotiations leading to the formation in 1970 of the British Association of Social Workers. It examines the considerations which led the Government to establish the Seebohm Committee on the personal social services, outlines the bold ambitions of the Committee's Report, published in 1968, and describes the only partially successful campaigns of the various associations of social workers, acting mainly through the Standing Conference of Organisations of Social Workers (SCOSW) and through the Seebohm Implementation Action Group, for their implementation in the Local Authority Social Services Act of 1970. The Act also established the Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work, and the disagreements within SCOSW about whether the council should be accountable to Ministers are also considered.

This chapter examines how the practice of social work was judged during the Colwell Inquiry and focuses particularly on the tensions that existed between competing understandings of its nature and purpose. First, it establishes the local context for the reorganisation of services that had followed from the implementation of the Local Authority Social Services Act of 1970. The two social workers most directly concerned with Maria Colwell's care were Daphne Josephine Kirby of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and Diana Lees of East Sussex Social Services Department. The charges laid against the social workers involved in the Colwell case fall into four broad categories: simple incompetence in carrying out their duties properly; the flawed nature of some of their fundamental assumptions about children and families; failures in the exercise of professional judgement; and a lack of awareness of the proper boundaries of social work. Taken together, these charges also constituted a powerful critique of social work itself.