Variations in the Provision of Financial Aid through Social Work in Scottish Local Authorities

Abstract

Section 12 of the Social Work (Scotland) Act 1968 gave social work departments in Scotland the power to offer financial aid to any member of the community to ‘promote social welfare’. Although a major break with past practice and theory, it seems that these new powers have been used to different extents by social work departments. The aim of this paper is to show how an explanation of these variations might be attempted, first, the paper reviews such ways of accounting for the variations as the extent to which financial aid is used as a substitute for payments by the SBC, the possibility that financial aid is being used as a substitute for other services, and the way that decisions are made in social work departments and variations in staffing. Secondly, it looks at the correlation between variables which might be seen as a measure of these items and variations in the provision of financial aid. In conclusion, it is suggested that a fairly high proportion of the variations in the provision of financial aid can be explained by two variables: the total expenditure on social work by the authority and the number of children under eighteen multiplied by the proportion of the authority’s population in Socio-Economic Grouping II.