There are 416 references to ‘safe’ / ‘safety’ / ‘safeguarding’ in the Care Act 2014 statutory guidance. The term dominates our narrative. But what do we really mean by ‘safe’? And is the extent of our ambitions really just that people are ‘safe’?

In this post I’ll explore this language and how it defines our purpose and our practice and our perception of people. And then in a follow-up post I’ll focus on reimagining the purpose of social care, from ‘keeping people safe’ to supporting people to flourish.

From safety net to springboard.

Safe

“The statutory guidance is clear that “professionals should work with the adult to establish what being safe means to them and how that can be best achieved.”

Department of Health and Social Care [1]

When I think about what being safe means to me, this is what comes to mind.

• Closing my own front door behind me and feeling that I’m home.
• Having enough of a rough idea about what’s happening in the next few days and weeks, but not so much of a plan that I feel pressured or constrained.
• The certainty of nature, and seasons, especially spring as hope emerges from the ground in green shoots, and promise unfurls with new leaves on the trees.
• Being held, and feeling held, by people who love me and care about me.

These are all things that help me to feel safe. They enable me to be me. Provide security. Roots. The ground beneath my feet.

So, to me, ‘safe’ means belonging. Friendship. Love. Noticing, and feeling noticed. Acceptance. Connection, and just enough control.

In the dictionary definition of the term ‘safe’, “if you are safe, you have not been harmed, or you are not in danger of being harmed.” [2] And this is where we locate our purpose and our practice. “Keeping people safe.” “Safeguarding vulnerable adults.” “Protecting those at risk of harm.” Indeed, the Care Act guidance is clear that “in any activity which a local authority undertakes, it should consider how to ensure that the person is and remains protected from abuse or neglect.”

However, the guidance is also clear that “it is not possible to promote wellbeing without establishing a basic foundation where people are safe”, and that “people have complex lives and being safe is only one of the things they want for themselves”. [3] (emphasis added).

“Being safe is not a freedom in its own right – it is what allows us to get on with the rest of our lives.” [4] Too often we focus on ‘safety’ as a destination, not as a “basic foundation” – an essential element of people’s wellbeing but one that matters little without other elements. As Lord Justice Munby famously observed, “what good is it making someone safer if it merely makes them miserable?” [5]

And too often we ignore the fact that it’s the other elements of people’s wellbeing that ensure their safety. We perpetuate the belief that our policies and our assessments and our plans and our services and our institutions keep people safe and overlook the extent to which connections and relationships and meaning and purpose keep people safe.

As Rob Mitchell reflects in relation to the Munby quote, “I remember realising early on in my career that the most vulnerable people to abuse are the ones who didn’t have anyone who loved them.” [6]

And as Maff Potts reminds us, “the more people in a community who know each other by their first name the safer that community is.” [7]

Things that do not involve any risk

The dictionary also defines the term safe as “things that do not involve any risk”. [8]

And we take this literally, with a perpetual focus on ‘assessing risk’ and ‘managing risk’ and ‘reducing risk’. But it’s impossible to live – to have a life – without risk, so whose risks are we really concerned about here?

Who exactly are we protecting?

“Here’s a social work trap. How many times do we get this – ‘Can you provide assurance to me/the board/this meeting that P is absolutely safe?’ Our answer must surely always be ‘no, I cannot do that. No one can. And the reason you are asking me is to make you safe, not the person.’”

Rob Mitchell [9]

Safe places

“A safe place is one where it is unlikely that any harm, damage, or unpleasant things will happen to the people or things that are there.”

Collins dictionary [10]

In everyday, good lives we might define our home or our community as our safe place. The place we feel welcome and known. Where we feel we belong.

But in serviceland, ‘safe places’ or ‘places of safety’ are institutions. “Residential accommodation provided by a local social services authority.” “A hospital.” “A police station.” “An independent hospital or care home for people who are mentally disordered.” [11] They are places that people are ‘admitted to’ and ‘discharged to’. ‘Conveyed to’ and ‘transported between’. ‘Kept in’. ‘Detained in’. Places with ‘procedures’ and ‘uniforms’ and ‘wards’ and ‘assessment rooms’ and ‘staff rest areas’.

Places where people become ‘patients’ and ‘service users’.

Alex Fox suggests that “one of the signs you are living in an invisible asylum is that you are in a place of ‘safety’, as defined by others who have a professional (but not necessarily personal) responsibility for keeping you ‘safe’”. He acknowledges the benefits of a society with such a ‘safety net’, but stresses “it is important to recognise that support of this kind will never be unproblematically benign. It is support which at times keeps people safe from death, but at other times keeps people ‘safe’ from life”. [12]

And reflecting on his dad’s experience in a hospital where “somewhere in the transition between two wards, his dentures went missing and could not be found”, Neil Crowther writes “that afternoon I spoke to the social worker. I think she felt she was being sympathetic, but when I told her about the dentures going missing she replied that ‘it happens all the time… and hearing aids too’. She then went on to advise that my dad was ‘in a place of safety’. I suggested she might reconsider whether someone is safe in a place where patients routinely lose the means to eat or to hear but she was on auto-pilot.” [13]

In our ‘auto-pilot’ mode, the places we call ‘safe’ are often places where people are disconnected from their identity and from the people and places and things that matter most to them.

From the people and places and things that make them feel safe.

Safeguarding

The Care Act 2014 introduced ‘adult safeguarding’ as a statutory duty, and the related statutory guidance “endorses the ‘Making Safeguarding Personal’ approach [which] represents a fundamental shift in social work practice in relation to safeguarding, with a focus on the person not the process.” [13] (emphasis added).

‘Safeguarding’ is a magic word in serviceland, the key to the door of a whole new world – or at least a whole new ‘workflow’. And as if the term ‘safeguarding’ wasn’t jargon enough, there’s also a whole new language (‘concern’, ‘allegation’, ‘adult at risk’, ‘Section 42 enquiry’…) and a huge heap of acronyms. SAB, SAM, SAR, SCR, DHR, MASH, MARAC, MAPPA, MSP, PiPoT and many more.

We recruit social workers to “triage and assess safeguarding concerns”. To “undertake safeguarding investigations and develop and implement protection plans.” To “contribute to the operational delivery of the multi-agency safeguarding policy and procedures.” To “participate in safeguarding adults strategy meetings.” To “prepare safeguarding reports for safeguarding case conferences”. To “pro-actively work towards the timely resolution, recording and closure of safeguarding enquiries in line with agreed timescales and team performance frameworks”.

We still focus on the process, not the person.

Those who cannot protect themselves

‘Vulnerable person. ‘Adult at risk’. ‘Safeguarding cases.’ ‘Those who cannot protect themselves’.

As well as denying and eroding unique identities, our labels imply deficits and helplessness.

Contrast this with community-based alternatives. With the Camerados approach of asking someone who is struggling to help you. (Camerados ) With the peer-led People Focused Group (PFG) in Doncaster, where instead of asking what’s wrong or what people ‘need’, they ask “what would you like to contribute to your community? What skills and gifts would you like to share?” Talking about this recently with PFG Director Glyn Butcher, I asked him what this approach means to people. Glyn said, “it gives people a sense of purpose. It gives people a sense of identity. It says that I’m worth something. It says that I’m valuable. It says that it’s ok to be me”.[14]

A secure footing

The full sentence from the Care Act guidance that I quoted above is that “it is not possible to promote wellbeing without establishing a basic foundation where people are safe and their care and support is on a secure footing.” [15]

Care and support on a secure footing? Can anyone actually say that?

Highlighting the fragility of the care and support system on Twitter recently, one person who draws on support wrote, “I think it’s almost unquantifiable how much of a difference people knowing things aren’t constantly moments from full collapse would be.” They described the system as ‘wildly unsafe both physically and psychologically, currently.”

And Anna Severwright has spoken and written a number of times about the fear of support being cut. “It makes me feel sick to think that my review is coming up because it is so out of my control, and those hours could be cut… It is such a scary time for us when we are under review. I know many people who have had their hours cut, often by up to a third, just like that. That is a third less life that that person can effectively be getting on with and living.” [16]

The statutory safety net of social care has too many holes to adequately assure safety, let alone to promote wellbeing and ensure that people thrive. As I’ve heard Neil Crowther say a number of times, “social care is both under-resourced and under-imagined”. [17]

Confining our thinking and our ambitions to ‘keeping people safe’ and ‘protecting our most vulnerable’ traps us in a world where we hold all the power and responsibility. Where we focus on ‘looking after’ and ‘protecting’ and ‘caring for’ ‘others’. We’re we judge what is ‘appropriate’ and what is ‘unwise’ and what is ‘safe’. Where we spend our time raising concerns and assessing risk and completing forms and writing policies and following procedures and making referrals and sitting in meetings and ‘learning lessons’, while families and friends and neighbours and community groups are busy weaving the webs of relationships and support that affirm identities, ensure belonging, and enable people to live fulfilling lives. Creating genuinely safe spaces, like Camarados’ public living rooms, with “people who listen, who treat everyone the same, who don’t judge or try to fix you” [18] and PFG’s Wellness Centre where, as PFG Director Glyn Butcher said recently, “we’re not here to save people. We’re here to help people flourish in whatever they choose to be.”[19]

However, if we reimagine the purpose of care and support as caring about each other, as supporting people to flourish, to live gloriously ordinary lives, we flip our focus from what is or might go wrong, to what is possible. Focus “not simply on people’s freedom from harm… but on what is required to accord them the freedom to flourish as human beings, ensuring they have genuine autonomy to shape a life worth living.” [20]

There are 416 references to ‘safe’ / ‘safety’ / ‘safeguarding’ in the Care Act 2014 statutory guidance, and 244 references to abuse.

There is one reference to ‘love’, and one to ‘belonging’.

And no mention of ‘flourishing’ or ‘thriving’.

It’s time to flip this narrative.

“A ship in harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.”

John A Shedd [21]

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References

[1] Care and support statutory guidance, Department of Health and Social Care, Updated 5 October 2023

[2] Safe, Collins dictionary

[3] Care and support statutory guidance, Department of Health and Social Care, Updated 5 October 2023

[4] From safety net to springboard A new approach to care and support for all based on equality and human rights, Equality and Human Rights Commission. 2 February 2009

[5] Local Authority X v MM & Anor (No. 1) [2007] EWHC 2003 (Fam), Bailli, 21 August 2007

[6] A few years old now is the Munby quote…, Rob Mitchell, Twitter, 4 August 2023

[7] Been hearing stories of what real world changing work looks like… Maff Potts, Twitter, 7 September 2021

[8] Safe, Collins dictionary

[9] Here’s a social work trap… Rob Mitchell, Twitter, 30 April 2022

[10] Safe, Collins dictionary

[11] These are the places defined as ‘places of safety’ in Section 135 (6) of the Mental Health Act 1983.

[12] A new health and care system: Escaping the invisible asylum, Alex Fox, Policy Press, 2018

[13] Custard, Neil Crowther, Making rights make sense, 18 September 2020

[14] Glyn Butcher, People Focused Group Director, in a conversation with me recorded for the Social Care Future Community of Support on 29 February 2024.

[15] Care and support statutory guidance, Department of Health and Social Care, Updated 5 October 2023

[16] Health and Social Care Committee Oral evidence: Management of the coronavirus outbreak, HC 206, House of Commons, Tuesday 9 June 2020

[17] Living good lives in the place we call home – An outline programme for the next government, Social Care Future, February 2024

[18] Camerados

[19] Glyn Butcher, People Focused Group Director, in a conversation with me recorded for the Social Care Future Community of Support on 29 February 2024.

[20] From safety net to springboard A new approach to care and support for all based on equality and human rights, Equality and Human Rights Commission. 2 February 2009

[21] This quote is widely attributed to John A Shedd, original source unknown.