Education secretary Bridget Phillipson and health and social care secretary Wes Streeting (credit: Labour Party)
Loading …The watchdog that monitors Social Work England has written to cabinet ministers to raise concerns over chronic delays to fitness to practise (FtP) cases.
In its latest report on the regulator, covering 2024, the Professional Standards Authority (PSA) said Social Work England had failed to meet its standard on the fairness and efficiency of its FTP system, for the third year running. The regulator met all 17 of the PSA’s other standards, in a generally positive review.
Social Work England did not meet the remaining standard (standard 15) because of ongoing delays in completing FTP cases, with no improvement in timeliness during 2024, said the PSA.
Concerns escalated to cabinet ministers
As a result, PSA chair Caroline Corby has written to education secretary Bridget Phillipson and health and social care secretary Wes Streeting to raise its concerns about the situation with them.
While she acknowledged that Social Work England was “taking steps to improve its processes and learn from the delays”, this had not generated improvements.
In separate letters, Corby set out the consequences of the issue to Phillipson and Streeting: “Every stakeholder that we met with for our 2023-24 performance review, and most stakeholders that provided us with written feedback, raised their concerns about this issue.
“For registrants, fitness to practise delays can have a significant impact on their wellbeing and cause financial hardship. For people raising concerns with Social Work England, these delays can mean they are waiting years for a resolution to their concern, which can be particularly difficult where the alleged conduct has had a significant impact on their life.”
Delays at all stages of fitness to practise process
Latest figures show significant delays at all stages of Social Work England’s FTP process:
- Triage: Cases that completed the triage stage in October to December 2024 took an average of 35 weeks to do so, compared with 28 weeks in July to September and 22 weeks in April to June last year. At triage, Social Work England staff determine whether the concerns about the social worker merit investigation.
- Investigation: While the average age of cases that completed the investigations process has fallen steadily, from 68 weeks in January to March 2024 to 60 weeks in October to December last year, the average age of remaining cases rose from 62 to 74 weeks over this time. This compares to a quarterly target of 56 weeks for October to December 2024.
- Case examiner: During October to December 2024, cases took an average of 13 weeks to complete the case examiner process, the same as in the previous quarter and just above the target of 12 weeks. At this stage, pairs of examiners review the investigation report to determine whether the concerns about the social worker could realistically be proved and, if so, whether their fitness to practise could be found to be impaired.
- Final hearings: Social Work England held just five final hearings in October to December 2024, down from 13 in the previous two quarters, and from 64 in April to June 2023. The number of open cases at the hearings stage rose from 386 as of June 2024 to 421 at the end of last year.
Causes of delay
The causes of the delays are multiple, including the regulator receiving higher than expected numbers of FTP concerns since its inception in 2019 and having cases delayed by family court proceedings.
More recently, it has struggled to adequately staff its triage and investigations teams and has had to reduce the number of hearings it holds due to lack of budget.
The PSA cited action that Social Work England had taken in response, including piloting having two-person, rather than three-person, panels, to increase capacity to conclude more hearings, and reviewing adjournments in hearings to identify opportunities to prevent future breaks in proceedings.
The regulator was also providing more support to investigators to help them progress their most complex cases, while having case examiners share learning with investigators to prevent adjournments being necessary at the case examiner stage, said the PSA.
Performance ‘comparable to worst performing regulators’
However, the watchdog, which also oversees nine health professional regulators, stressed that these actions had not led to improvements in the timeliness of cases, where Social Work England’s performance was currently “comparable to the worst performing regulators in this area”.
In its report, the PSA referenced a joint statement made by the British Association of Social Workers (BASW), Social Workers Union (SWU) and UNISON in May 2025 raising concerns about the impact of FTP delays on the social workers concerned.
In response to the PSA report, SWU general secretary John McGowan said: “It has been almost a year since SWU, BASW, and UNISON jointly wrote to Social Work England to express our deep concerns about the regulator’s ongoing and increasing delays in processing fitness to practise cases.
“Since that time, the PSA has concluded that Social Work England has not improved performance in this area, its hearing stage backlog has continued to grow, and many people are rightly still raising concerns about how long the process is taking.
Social workers ‘experiencing stress beyond belief’
“The 421 social workers in England with open cases at the end of 2024 deserve better support than this and it is a shame that the regulator has been classified by PSA as ‘comparable to the worst performing regulators in this area’.
“No matter the outcome of their cases these social workers are experiencing stress beyond belief.
“I hope this report convinces Social Work England to continue with their engagement with the four asks in our joint letter to improve their fitness to practises process.”
These were: ensuring investigations were more “collaborative and thorough”; providing case examiners with updated guidance and training, to help them take account of contextual factors in their decisions; developing alternative outcomes for social workers who have been awaiting a hearing for years, and adopting a “more reasonable approach” to the voluntary removal of social workers subject to FTP processes from the register.
Social Work England ‘has plans for improvement’
Giving the regulator’s response to the PSA report, Social Work England chief executive Colum Conway said: “While timeliness in our fitness to practise process continues to be a challenge, we do have a pathway to achieving standard 15 which requires additional funding over time.
“The delays in case progression are unacceptable for us and for everyone involved.”
A spokesperson for the regulator added: “Plans and actions are already in place for improvement, and more details will be published in our business plan for 2025 to 2026.”
Fee rise ‘should enable more resource for fitness to practise’
In relation to increasing funding, Corby told Phillipson and Streeting that Social Work England’s proposed 33% increase in practitioner fees from September “should enable it to devote more resources to fitness to practise”.
The Social Work England spokesperson said that “the additional income from any potential fee increases would support us to deliver all our regulatory objectives and goals with a focus on improving timeliness in our fitness to practise process”.
However, McGowan warned that SWU members were concerned that the regulator was “now considering passing the cost of improvement attempts along to social workers – a workforce already strained by over a decade of budget cuts, ongoing recruitment and retention issues, and the cost-of-living crisis”.
The fee increase will only boost Social Work England’s overall level of income if it is not offset by reductions in DfE grant.
Shifting balance of income from government to social worker
Social Work England’s justification for the increase is to shift the balance of income it receives towards social workers and away from the DfE, whose share rose from 52% to 57% from 2020-21 to 2023-24 to help the regulator deal with rising fitness to practise costs.
The spokesperson added: “Our budget is overseen by the Department for Education and is typically agreed annually, including the level of grant in aid, with no capacity to hold funds in reserve over multiple years.
“We continue to work with our sponsor, the Department for Education, to review our overall resourcing needs. We anticipate that our overall level of income will continue to be determined in this way.”
