Response to the Professional Standards Authority's consultation on the standards of good regulation

8 May 2025

Social Work England welcomes the opportunity to respond to the Professional Standards Authority’s (the Authority) consultation on the Standards of Good Regulation and the Standards for Accredited Registers. We value the feedback and insight we get from the Authority’s performance reviews, and tailored and proportionate standards are crucial to this. Our response, below, is limited to comment on the proposals for the Standards of Good Regulation (the standards), as those are applicable to our organisation.

Are the standards looking for the right things?

We believe the standards are an effective way of assessing and reporting the performance of the regulators they apply to. From our perspective as the professional regulator of social workers, they cover the core functions and key risk areas that arise from our regulatory operations, while allowing sufficient flexibility to encompass the differing contexts and demands of the professions we regulate. We caution against removing standards covering important functions (such as the setting of education and training standards), that are currently routinely met, as regulatory agendas and priorities are often cyclical, with issues deemed low risk often reemerging as priorities over time. We would also not wish to see any perceived imbalance between the number of standards relating to fitness to practise, and those applying to other regulatory functions, be exacerbated. 

While we appreciate that the standards need to be applied to a broad range of regulators, some of the language used is more applicable to health care professionals, settings and regulators, than for social care or social work. For example, standard 4 refers to ‘healthcare regulatory issues’, and ‘patients and service users’ are referred to throughout the standards. There is an established body of literature that suggests terms such as 'service user' can be perceived as dehumanising to those engaging with services, reducing them to passive recipients or even burdens. Given the vulnerability of many who interact with social workers, and the power imbalance inherent in certain settings, the careful use of language is important. As the specialist regulator for social workers, we feel where possible, the wording of standards should be expanded to more explicitly include the social work and care sector, adding terms such as ‘people with lived experience of social work’ or those ‘engaging with social workers’. This would help begin to address the sort of structural inequalities raised in Safer Care for All.

Clarity, accessibility and transparency

Merging Standards 14 and 18

While we welcome attempts to simplify the standards, we consider that Standards 14 and 18 have different goals and merging them would risk conflating 2 separate issues. Standard 14 requires that the concerns process is well publicised and open to all. The focus is on a proportionate balance between allowing everyone to raise concerns, and having in place robust guidance and decision-making to make sure only the appropriate concerns progress through the fitness to practise process.

Standard 18, however, relates to supporting complainants, registrants and witnesses through the fitness to practise process once they are in it, including the availability of support services. We consider that these are different issues, requiring distinct functions, and that merging them could remove or dilute that focus. The importance of support through the fitness to practise process, in particular, has been recognised in the recent Witness to Harm research, to which you refer.

Separating Standard 15

We understand the rationale behind the proposal to split Standard 15 into 2 standards. As noted, while timeliness can be a factor in the fairness and proportionality of fitness to practise processes, there are a number of other interdependencies at play. At present, the challenges many regulators face with timeliness risk overshadowing other factors that make a fitness to practise process fair and proportionate. Currently, the way reviews are reported can mean that Standard 15 not being met due to timeliness could be interpreted as processes not being fair and proportionate, despite the more detailed findings which reflect the broader context.

However, while separating Standard 15 may allow for greater consideration of the various factors that affect timeliness, we believe this could also be achieved within the existing standard, as written. In our experience, gathering information about social work fitness to practise cases can take significant time, particularly given their complexity and the high proportion of complainants who are either vulnerable or have experienced a very difficult period in their lives. Yet this information is often vital to ensuring a fair outcome. As such, fairness and timeliness can be seen as 2 sides of the same coin, and an excessive focus on one will likely impinge upon the other. We would propose a more nuanced consideration of this dynamic during reviews, along with the application of a profession-specific evidence base for what constitutes 'timely' in fitness to practise for a given regulator.

We also note that another standard relating to fitness to practise would risk exacerbating the imbalance between regulatory functions alluded to earlier in the consultation. Given that standard 11, for example, speaks to the combined timeliness, fairness and proportionality of the registration process, there would need to be a very clear and robust rationale for separating timeliness out for fitness to practise.

New standard on culture, leadership and governance

While we acknowledge the importance of culture, leadership and governance, we do not think it would be appropriate for the Authority to include these as part of an additional standard. 

Firstly, existing standards 1, 2, 4 and 5 all touch on aspects of governance (and by implication, leadership). The Authority also has further oversight of many of its regulators’ governance through its involvement in their council appointment processes. To go beyond this, by shifting emphasis from regulatory outcomes to something as subjective as organisational culture, would represent a significant departure for the standards. Applying the language of Right-Touch Regulation, we do not believe the Authority has sufficiently outlined the issue to be resolved, or quantified the risk that issue represents, to justify such a step.

We also note that the Authority has not provided information on how it would assess culture, leadership and governance, and instead has asked this as part of the consultation. We believe gathering objective evidence of these would be extremely challenging, and we are not convinced that it would be possible to conduct a meaningful assessment within the time and resources available during a periodic or monitoring review. There would also be the risk of such an assessment compromising, or being perceived as compromising, a regulator’s independence. We also note that where the Authority have concerns about a regulator, either as a result of a periodic review or otherwise, it already has the ability to conduct a special review. We consider that such a special review would be the more appropriate avenue for considering culture, leadership and governance, if concerns arose.

As a matter of ongoing monitoring and assurance, we consider the most appropriate body to consider a regulator’s culture, leadership and governance is its board or council. These bodies have independence from day-to-day management while still having more resources to consider concerns and are able to look at these complex topics over a longer period of time. In the specific context of Social Work England, we also have regular audits from the National Audit Office and the input of our sponsor team from the Department for Education, as an Arm’s-Length Body. We suggest that the Authority also assessing our culture, leadership and governance via an additional standard would be an unnecessary duplication of functions.

Collaboration

With regards collaboration between regulators, and with other stakeholders, we agree that it is important to share good practice and understand the broader context in which we work. We do not, however, consider that the standards are an appropriate forum for this. It would be challenging to measure how a regulator collaborates, and the impact this collaboration has on its effective regulation, given the differing needs these collaborations would serve across a diverse range of regulatory and professional contexts.

For example, we meet regularly with our partner regulators from the devolved nations, sharing best practice, collaborating in research and outreach activities, as well as seeking to driving improvement in care across the UK. We have also collaborated with the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC), Social Care Wales and The Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) to draft revised Education and Training standards for AMHP and BIA courses, drawing on their experiences and expertise to shape our approach. We are uncertain how the efficacy or importance of each of these varied pieces of collaborative work could be evaluated against a defined standard, collectively or individually. Instead, we consider that the Authority could provide a more valuable role in supporting such work between regulators through its policy function, expanding on the themes found in Right-Touch Regulation and Safer Care For All, to provide the more nuanced approach necessary to encouraging collaboration.

However, if the Authority does wish to measure collaboration with stakeholders against a standard, rather than the addition of a new one, we would encourage a review of the way standard 5 is assessed. This standard already looks at collaboration with other stakeholders in respect of risk management, and could be expanded to include a broader conception of the sharing of best practice, and its role in reducing risk to the public.

Criminal records checks

We agree that convictions can have an impact on someone’s ability to join a register and stay registered, however, we have yet to see the case to establish regulator-assured criminal record checks as a measure proportionate to the risk of undeclared convictions. Once again applying the language of Right-Touch Regulation, we do not consider that the consultation paper has identified the problem to be addressed, or quantified and qualified the level of risk this represents. We are also not clear on the outcome that the Authority wants to achieve. Without a better understanding of this, we do not believe that an expectation of regulators assuring criminal records checks through the Standards is the most proportionate approach. 

By way of context for the social work profession, our education and training standards require training providers to carry out criminal conviction checks on all students before they begin their courses. Once qualified, we know that local authorities — the largest employers of social workers — conduct their own criminal record checks at the point of employment. Similarly, social workers would be required by agencies to provide evidence of up to date criminal records checks to undertake locum work. While some social workers may be self-employed or not currently employed, the majority of social workers in practice do have an employer and criminal record checks will have been undertaken.

For Social Work England to establish on a case-by-case basis whether a social worker was undergoing checks through work would be a substantial undertaking. While we do currently ask that applicants tell us about any current or prospective employers, we would likely require changes to our legislation to allow us to validate this information with each employer and confirm that criminal records checks have been done. We would then need to carry out this validation process for over 100,000 registrants.

If we were to attempt the more proportionate approach of simply asking those social workers who are either not employed or who have not undergone a criminal conviction check elsewhere to make themselves known to us, then we struggle to understand how this would provide any further assurance than the existing requirement to self-declare criminal convictions at the point of registration or at registration renewal. We note the recent Bailey Review of the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) highlighted significant issues around the provision for self-employed people, raising concerns as to how effective any such requirement would be in reducing risk to the public.

An additional standard in this area would require significant financial and staff resource to administer, not only for us, but potentially for employers and the DBS. We would need to expend further resource reminding social workers to provide us with the necessary information, as there would be a substantive risk to retention of the register from those who failed to do so in a timely fashion. It would also, unavoidably, represent a duplication in function to that already undertaken by the vast majority of employers, an outcome the consultation explicitly states the Authority wishes to avoid.

For these reasons we are strongly opposed to the introduction of an expectation that we assure criminal record checks are in place.

We look forward to continuing to engage with you during the post-consultation period to understand more about what the standards will look like in practice. The wording of the standards and the surrounding evidence framework will be crucial to regulators ensuring that they are meeting the standards, and the public being assured that regulators are upholding the protection of the public. We note that the Authority intends to implement any changes within the current strategic cycle (so by April 2026), and we would welcome assurance that regulators will have sufficient time to feed back on the feasibility of new standards and wordings, as well as preparing for new forms of evidence gathering, prior to their launch.

Yours sincerely,

Colum Conway

Chief Executive