understanding welfare

The first 200 words of this essay...

This essay will outline the major policy and legislative changes to social work services in Scotland since the 1980's in relation to community care. Community care is an interesting area to study as it raises questions about how the most vulnerable people in our society should be cared for (Sharkey 1995). When Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, Britain had suffered a winter of discontent with wide spread strikes and unrest, social workers had been involved in scandals where they had been proven not to be doing their jobs (Fraser, 2003). Margaret Thatcher set about reforming the welfare state through a mixed economy of welfare (Fraser, 2003) as Beveridge's ideas of a universal and comprehensive system of welfare were based on a nuclear family unit which was no longer applicable to modern society. The 1988 Griffith Report on Community Care recommended that care should be provided to those in need as a partnership arrangement between those requiring care, their families, voluntary agencies and the state (Fraser, 2003). The official government response to Griffiths was the 1989 white paper Caring for People, Community Care in the Next Decade and Beyond, which set out the government policy on community care, largely adopting