Advocacy versus Social Work: What the Setting-Up of an Advocacy Rights Hub Reveals about Social Work's Ability to Promote Social Inclusion

Abstract

This paper uses a service evaluation of a city-wide Advocacy Rights Hub, based in a northern-English city, as a vehicle to explore the shift in welfare provision away from regulated state welfare to the deregulated voluntary sector in circumstances of diminishing welfare resources in the UK. It focuses on two significant trends relating to welfare that are exposed through the evaluation. The first is how social policies are increasingly directed away from addressing the needs of the socially excluded in low-income communities. The second and related issue is how these policy trends have led to the ascendency of advocacy and shrinking of statutory social work. It will reveal the inability of statutory social workers to act as advocates and reach out to the socially excluded, and how the contested territory of advocacy lays bare the increasing erosion of social work's professional values and principles.