To whom may powers and duties be given?
Gwyneth Roberts
One of the interesting things about social work law is how the powers and duties are distributed, because they’re not normally assigned to individual social workers. That body of the law, the duties, are placed on the organisations in which social workers function. And these are normally local authorities. So it is the local authority which is a legal body in itself which is actually the organisation to whom the legal rules are assigned. And so social workers get their powers and duties normally through being employees of that public body. And this is done through delegation. So, in fact, social workers’ contract of employment is really important because that tells them what bit of this body of law they are practising. So, are they practising with children? Are they practising with elderly people? Are they practising with people with physical disability or with people with mental problems, mental health problems? And that’s very important although sometimes the law puts the powers and duties directly on social workers themselves and one example of that is becoming an approved social worker, which gives that person powers and duties under The Mental Health Act of1983, directly. However, the interesting thing also, is that they first of all have to be employees of the local authority which approves them to carry out that direct role. So it’s very important I think to understand the organisational context in which social work takes place and to know therefore how that structure and its bureaucracy affects social work practice.