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Abstract

LOCAL AuTHORm SOCIAL sEBVICE8 ACT 1970 TEE social services provided by local authorities have been developed almost entirely at random during the past eighty years, in response to the perceived needs of the moment, rather than in accordance with preconceived theories of social welfare and administration.In so far as these services were governed by any guiding administrative principle, it was the principle laid down by Edwardian poor law reformers like Morant and the Webbs, that social services should be divided according to a strict classification of their functions, rather than according to the social and economic status of their clients.'This was a useful principle with which to attack the prevailing distinction between '' pauper )' and '' nonpauper " services; but it was rather a crude instrument for discovering and relieving different kinds of social need.It led to a situation in which the problems of a single family might be examined and treated by a dozen or more statutory and voluntary social work agencies; and it ignored the fact that, although problems of education, housing, health, old age and child care may be logically separable, they are in a large number of cases practically interdependent.Lack of coordination among the different local authority social service departments, and the need for a more synoptic, '' familycentred " service have been discussed by several investigating bodies during the past decade Z-the latest and most exhaustive of these being Sir Frederick Seebohm's Committee on Local Authority and Allied Personal Services which reported in July 1968.The Seebohm Committee outlined a plan for the drastic revision of local social services, in both organisation and general frame of reference.It proposed that the functions of local children's departments should be linked with the " social " functions of housing, education, health and welfare departments, and with the welfare services available under the National Assistance Act, to form one single consolidated cc social service department."s These departments should ultimately be staffed, no longer by specialists familiar with only one branch of social work, but by generically-trained social workers able to understand and

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