The Social Work Awards fulfil an important function - here's what they don't tell you

There are some truly amazing and inspirational stories coming out of the recent Social Work Awards. Good social work flourishing amid adversity should be applauded. Congratulations to all finalists and winners who accept these Awards in good faith and who I know would never seek to place themselves above others.

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However, there is another side to the Awards that rarely gets mentioned amid the focus on positive narratives, hope and achievement. Difficult though it may be to confront, the Social Work Awards in their current form are very much about serving the interests of the private businesses involved in making the Awards what they are today: a corporately-sponsored business networking opportunity.

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No-one says that out loud. What they do say is that the Social Work Awards are about celebrating social work, that they are about recognising the best of social work. Leaving aside the troubling notion that social work can be ‘judged’ in these terms and uncomfortable questions about why would even seek to do so, the overall point that positive narratives of social work should be promoted and examples of great social work upheld is hard to argue with. So, what’s not to like?

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Well, it really comes down to questions of who is doing this, and why.

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The Social Worker of the Year Awards were founded in 2006 by social worker Beverly Williams and for a number of years were a modest and well-regarded celebration of the profession. Since 2011, however, the Awards have been a far more ostentatious affair involving an “exclusive” gala ceremony and plenty of glitz and glamour. Leaving aside debates about the messaging of social workers living it up at a posh London hotel, partaking in the finest food and drink, while the vast majority of the people they support contend with crushing poverty, let’s look at how the Awards came to be the lavish event they are today and, importantly, who was behind that.

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The transformation of the Social Work Awards from its modest, grassroots beginnings to its current high-profile, glitzy, celebrity-endorsed jamboree is due to Genesis PR, appointed in 2011 by the Awards’ chief sponsors, Sanctuary Personnel, one of the largest social work recruitment businesses in the UK. Genesis’ brief was to achieve charitable status for the Awards and advance the Awards’ overarching mission to raise the positive profile of social work. The main thrust of Genesis PR’s strategy was to reinvent the Awards as corporate sponsorship-based business-networking event.

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This is not particularly shocking in itself. It is beyond question that core functions of all corporate awards schemes are the generation of positive publicity and the enablement of business networking for sponsors. According to the Social Work Awards’ own sponsorship marketing material, sponsorship of the Awards purchases those very things:

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· ‘The opportunity to network with key individuals across the world of social work at the Social Worker of the Year Awards ceremony and exclusive Winners Parliamentary Reception

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· ‘Raise your organisation’s profile and increase brand awareness: our comprehensive marketing and PR programme reaches millions of people across England each year’

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What is, I think, objectionable, is the framing and publicising of the Social Work Awards as being solely about ‘celebrating social work’. While this is clearly one of its functions – and one to be applauded – I do have to wonder how clear it is to finalists and supporters of the Awards the extent to which these awards serve the interests of private businesses, including, as has certainly been the case in the past, those working counter to the values of the profession and the interests of the people and communities we support. See, for example, previous sponsorship by G4S and Capita, both of which profiting from being key players in the hostile environments for migrant and disabled people.

To this day, I would argue that the headline sponsor of the Social Work Awards is profiting from activities that run counter to the goals and interests of the profession and the people we support.

Sanctuary Personnel has been the ‘headline sponsor’ of the annual Social Worker of the Year Awards for the past twelve years. During this time Sanctuary Personnel’s profits from social work recruitment have increased. Last year Sanctuary posted gross profits of ￡21m, up from ￡17.5m the year before. There can be no doubt that Sanctuary is both a key player in, and chief beneficiary of, the growing social work recruitment industry which is extracting increasing profits from the public purse, while social support and welfare services or the people we support are decimated due to funding cuts and austerity.

The CEO of Sanctuary Personnel has been a member of the Social Work Awards’ board of trustees since 2014. He is a previous chair of the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC), the ‘voice of the recruitment industry’. The CEO of Sanctuary Personnel currently sits as chair of REC’s health and social care board, which ‘actively campaign[s] and lobb[ies] on behalf of members’. It’s ‘priorities’ include fostering the recruitment ‘market’ in health and social care, attempting to undermine NHS-run staff ‘banks’ (which provide temporary workers without the need for recruitment agencies) and increasing the influence of recruitment agencies within the public sector.

Sanctuary Personnel, in partnership with another large recruitment agency, Seven Resourcing, was recently bought out by private equity investors, meaning the Social Work Awards are now sponsored by a growing business empire that is in hock to the same sort of opaque private investors that are extracting excessive profits from children’s residential care, often for inadequate or poor services, and to extremely damaging effect on the outcomes for the children and families concerned.

You probably don’t know about any of this because neither the Social Work Awards nor its chief sponsor tend to emphasise these things in their publicity. Why is that?

As noted, Sanctuary appointed Genesis PR in 2011 to overhaul and rebrand the Awards as a high-end corporate event. One of Genesis’s first acts was to secure G4S as major sponsor for the 2011 Awards, a company mired?—?then, as it is now?—?in controversy concerning its practices and activities. The Social Work Action Network (SWAN) subsequently campaigned?—?successfully?—?for the Awards to drop G4S as sponsors in 2012, highlighting concerns about the company’s facilities in the occupied territories which detained Palestinian children and also its running of The Cedars, a ‘pre-departure’ detention centre in the UK in which immigrant children and families were detained prior to deportation. G4S subsequently gained contracts to provide secure facilities for children and young people, including Medway Secure Training Centre in Kent where staff abuse of resident children and young people was uncovered by BBC Panorama in 2016. The case study of Genesis PR’s stellar handling of the Social Work Awards reboot contains this quote from the then Managing Director of G4S Children’s Services:

“G4S Children’s Services were pleased to sponsor the SWA in 2011 and ensure that staff are properly recognised for the job they do. The event was beneficial in raising our profile as a provider of quality services for looked after children and young people and we have been able to follow up with attendees to support the work we undertake”.

Purely on the basis of what G4S and its record in public services represent, it’s both astonishing and dismaying that the firm were even considered suitable to sponsor the Social Work Awards in the first place. This surely must lead to questions about the wisdom of handing over control of the Social Work Awards to a for-profit PR firm with a brief that seems not to have required it to consider the ethical dimensions of its decision-making. Dismaying also to think that the G4S’s sponsorship of the 2011 Social Work Awards facilitated contact with influential players in social work and social care which it was, by its own account, later able to follow up on.

You would think they’d have learned from the G4S debacle. But no. In 2018, the ‘Championing Social Work Values’ category at the Social Work Awards was sponsored by outsourcing giant Capita, by virtue of their partnership with Essex County Council, still a frequent sponsor and supporter of the Awards.

Examples of Capita’s business practices that hammer home the firm’s complete and utter unsuitability to be anywhere near a celebration of social work include its delivery of brutally discriminatory ‘work capability assessments’ for Personal Independence Payment applicants and its key role in the Windrush scandal in which it was offered bonuses by the Home Office for exceeding its deportation quota. Capita subsequently stepped down as sponsors following concerns raised by social workers, including some finalists in that year’s categories.

To be clear, discounting for a moment the concerns about the headline sponsor Sanctuary, there have not been any similar sponsorship missteps by the Awards since. However, the point to be made- here is that the Social Work Awards took action on G4S’s sponsorship of the Awards ONLY after concerted campaigning and pushback from within the profession, and it was Capita itself that stood down as sponsor in the face of concerns about their involvement. This raises questions about the suitability of handing control of a ‘celebration of social work’ over to a private company which clearly doesn’t have the ethical wherewithal to not have the Awards associated with businesses whose interests are antithetical to social work values, missions and principles.

Genesis continue to run the Social Work Awards. The firm was purchased in 2021 by PLMR (Political Lobbying and Media Relations Ltd) a company whose business is lobbying, networking and influencing in the public sector on behalf of paying customers. It would appear, then, that not only are the Social Work Awards a vehicle for the now private equity-owned Sanctuary Personnel to expand its reach in the social care and social work sectors, but that Genesis PR, which manages and runs these awards, is now part of a group of businesses involved in consulting, lobbying and media relations in the social care and health sectors, where the majority of social workers are employed.

All of this raises the questions: Who really benefits from the Social Work Awards? At what cost this platform for positive narratives of hope and achievement in social work? And, are private, growing businesses effectively using the Social Work Awards to ‘virtue wash’ their brands, using the considerable achievements of dedicated social workers, often in the face of professional and personal adversity, to advantage themselves in terms of networking, revenue and influence?

Further, there is the matter of the vaunted Parliamentary Reception which sees winners and sponsors visit the Houses of Parliament to have their photographs taken with government ministers. This reception costs in the region of ￡5000 which means the Social Work Awards are footing the bill for what amounts to a PR opportunity for favourable optics for the very politicians that are the cause of the austerity and ideological cruelty driving increasing social needs and the decimation of resources driving poor working conditions.

It is hard to escape the strong sense that we are all effectively being played for fools here, by government ministers and by the private businesses that stand to gain most from this enterprise.

Proponents of the Awards argue they celebrate social work’s capacity for positive change and social justice. They say the Awards celebrate the fact that social workers are able to achieve great things in the face of often seemingly insurmountable challenges. That being the case, a celebration of social work without an ostentatiously ‘distanced’ ceremony and co-opted parliamentary reception, without corporate sponsorship, without the expanding, private equity-owned Sanctuary Personnel or the for-profit lobbying and PR firm PLMR Genesis, should be possible.

Why not make it happen?