BASW UK Chair's Blog | March 2024

This February’s Council meeting was held in the very centre of busy Cardiff. It was so good to see so many people in person again, both at the Away Day beforehand and the full Council meeting the next day. Cardiff is a great place to stay, very friendly, welcoming and an easy place to do business. As I have said before, the collaboration and integration across statutory and third sector bodies is tangible and makes a noticeable difference. We were joined by Albert Heaney (Chief Social Care Officer for Wales) for dinner. As a social worker himself, he is passionate about all we stand for in social work and so the conversation was lively and well informed.

Our development day was well attended by both Executive and Council members, part of our growing intention to ensure we always have the right skills for proper governance and doing business both now and in the future. We want to see greater integration between the Council and the Executive so that we move forward together to deliver the best possible service for our members and for social work. The skills and style audit showed how much we have in common as well as reflecting a wide range of complementary skills. More work needs to be done on this.

Meanwhile, natural turnover means we will shortly be going out to advertisement again and especially for two unfilled vacancies – the position of Vice Chair and a new Director role to replace Neeta Baicher and Sumayya Hanson who resigned in January this year.  We will miss Sumayya’s contributions and wish her well in her next endeavour. Balance between the range of different skills, experience , styles, ages and indeed backgrounds is essential to reflect our current and potential future membership as we grow and spread our influence and visibility in the years ahead. We must always strive to be ahead of the curve in social work developments and for the wellbeing of our members.

Our agenda is always fully packed as you’d expect for such a significant profession.  We heard lively accounts first from the Wales and then from the NI Standing Committees on their progress to date. Notable was the recent extremely well executed video of Caroline Ewart. Listen to her expert speech on the recent public sector strike and the resumption of the Assembly at last which will lead to proper governance in Northern Ireland again.  We noted the important progress made by Fran Fuller as Chair of the Professional Development Committee with five new members and we ratified the Terms of Reference. This Committee is very much at the heart of all we do.  We also ratified the Terms of Reference for the new Committee for the Independents, and I am personally looking forward to hearing more from this growing and emerging part of our membership.

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion has moved up our agenda, quite literally, and we listened with great interest to Duc and Dean presenting the progress and dilemmas of this important work.  After detailed debate, Council decided that further deliberation was warranted to ensure we move forward at speed and in the right direction. We wish to have the terms of the membership consultation agreed at our next meeting.

As ever, our Experts presented a written and brief verbal report outlining their ongoing activity, including the welcome appointment of Emily Reynolds part time as their Co-Ordinator, who will support them with an ambitious workplan which includes ensuring all committees and groups across all for nations have a vibrant presence and contribution by Experts.

We then moved on to confidential items which we always try to keep to an absolute minimum. This time, the Nominations Committee, considered a number of matters, most of which will be in the public domain shortly. Meanwhile, Committee results of recent elections were announced (in the absence of myself and two others). I am honoured and grateful to you all to report that the Council confirms that I will be BASW UK Chair for a further two years. Also, the appointment unanimously of Janet Walker as Chair of the International Committee. Shortly thereafter it was announced that we are fortunate indeed in the appointment of Annie Ho, taking over the PHER Chair from Martin Sexton who stands down this June after 4 years service. The position of Vice Chair and a Directors role will be immediately readvertised, in order to complete appointments to start at the AGM in June.

The Finance and Organisational Development Committee included The Balanced Score Card and the Management Accounts, and the Risk and Audit Committee (chaired by Hilary Thomset) was attended by Andy Dains, our Accountants. We were pleased to hear that we have a clean audit and look forward to the Committee reporting back on deep dives into ‘reputation’ and ‘cyber security’ next time which should be really interesting. We are still seeking a replacement Chair for this new Committee so please be in contact with Jo Wathan on jo.wathan@basw.co.uk  if you want to hear more or would like to attend a meeting to see how it all works.

The Standing Orders Committee forwarded recommendations on each of the Motions which is covered more fully in the minutes. This year there were 5 motions, and Council agreed that Motions 1, 2 and 5 will not be going forward for a number of reasons which are now being fed back to the Nominees. This left Council with two substantive motions from Northern Ireland and from the Black Country which covered the increasing pressures in social work services and will go forward to the AGM in June. We also held a fairly detailed and difficult discussion on the 2023 Motion 2 amended, on the Palestine/Israeli situation on which feelings inevitably ran high and we considered how best to manage this in future. Meanwhile,  I am very much hoping that the new AGM format which is entirely virtual will work well for members. However, we are absolutely open to reconsidering if this does not feel the right way forward. I was personally surprised and disappointed that there are not more motions, given the current economic challenges and widespread extremely difficult time we and the people we work with are experiencing. I am hopeful we will hear more on this next year.

In addition, we discussed the major organisational projects, including CRM and website development and Membership strategy. We spent time looking at BASW’s General Election Manifesto which will be available shortly and will work well with the Poverty Campaign Guidance for social workers, which we’ve been working hard on with SWU. Finally, we managed a slightly briefer open discussion on leadership lead by Luke Geoghegan with expert input from SASW Chair, Jude Currie. This is something we will definitely want to come back to in future.

I will end with my customary vote of thanks to all those who have made and continue to make such a difference to BASW and ensure we are such a valuable and hard-working body. Looking ahead, I want to speak to those of you who have not yet engaged directly in our governance and may be feeling now is the time to contribute further. Like all professional bodies we need a fast of foot, energetic Council fit for the future. This means that as well as relying on the enormously valuable and known contributors, we also need to bring in fresh blood and plan to actively seek out new members, new Council Directors and Chairs of our Committees. Training and induction is available, so please come forward and give back to BASW your expertise and time when you can. More information is available on our website. We look forward to hearing from you.