The client speaks: consumer voices impact social work

Social work history in 20 books

Consumer research in social work

The 1970s saw the impact of consumer movements across Western societies; no less in social work. This week’s post in Social work history in 20 books begins a focus on John E. Mayer and Noel Timms’s (1970) book, The client speaks. This was the first consumer research study in social work, and it had a huge influence on thinking about social work. That it came out just as British social services were being reorganised into a major public service meant that increasingly it became impossible to conceive of social provision that was focused on changing individuals in society without considering the views and attitudes of the people that were being served.

The connections with the most recent book we examined in this series is the London Family Welfare Association (FWA). You may wonder how that is. The answer (contained in its historical timeline) is that the FWA was the new name of the COS, adopted in 1946, just after the end the second world war when new public services were developing and the welfare landscape was being transformed. After a further name change, it is now ‘Family Action’ following a merger with the UK-wide Family Service Units sixty years later in 2006. This meant it was able to claim it was the largest UK organisation working with families. Later still, it has merged with a range of other family social work and children’s services.

Loch’s ideas in How to help cases of distress contributed to ideas about social work, but his organisation, losing its power after the Edwardian era and first world war, became transmuted into a British organisation for family social work, mainly by his eminent mid-century successor, Bernard Astbury. By the 1960s, the FWA could claim to be the pre-eminent representative of traditional casework-style social work. It looked back on a history of influencing casework practice. Independent of the post-war children’s services, it was the obvious place for Mayer and Timms to carry out one of the most influential empirical studies of social work. They started a now-unstoppable trend towards consumer studies, and asking for consumer feedback is now a routine part of service evaluations.