Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, has announced that the Health Professions Council is to regulate social workers from April 2012 as part of a shake up of the Department of Health’s arm’s length bodies.  The General Social Care Council will be abolished.

Only a few months ago the Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence (CHRE) published recommendations for improving the troubled social care regulator. The Secretary of State acknowledged that the GSCC had made good progress in recent months but in reality the costs of maintaining an independent regulator for social workers were prohibitive. The Department’s arm’s length bodies will be reduced from 18 to 10 resulting in a saving of £180 million.

The Health Professions Council is an independent UK-wide multi-profession regulator which currently regulates fifteen professions including dietitians, educational psychologists, occupational therapists, paramedics and physiotherapists. Regulating social workers will add enormously to its caseload and its title will be altered to reflect its changing role. It will need to beef up its in-house expertise to begin to understand and regulate efficiently the diverse nature of the social work profession.

The CHRE is itself to be removed from the sector and it is proposed that it will become a self-funding body by charging a levy on regulators. Just why professionals should be called upon to pay not only for their own regulation but for a regulator to regulate their regulator, beggars belief. It appears that a wonderful opportunity to remove a superfluous layer of bureaucracy has been lost.

As part of the clear out the Human Fertilisation & Embryology Authority and the Human Tissue Authority are to go. They are to be retained as separate arm’s length bodies for the time being with the aim of transferring their functions by the end of the current parliament. It will be remembered that the last government attempted to merge these bodies but deep seated divisions between them prevented a successful liaison.