Now in its sixth edition, Community Care and the Law continues to genuinely defy and confound any fear that a book this big, particularly a law book, must be impenetrable and dull. It is, truly, a fascinating read, or a ‘dip into’ text for anyone working within social and community care in any role.
Throughout my years as a practising community care solicitor, Community Care and the Law was for me and my colleagues a ‘must have’ text, the ‘Holy Grail’ of community care. It was utilised and plundered daily for its quotes, and clear, coherent access to both the ‘letter’ and the ‘spirit’ of the law. Frequently we would recognise sentences or even paragraphs almost directly lifted from it in the letters we received from the other party’s lawyers and in counsel’s advice. ‘Indispensable’ did not come close to reflecting its true worth as a practitioner’s text. The sixth edition’s extensive, up-to-date (as at March 2017) tables of cases, ombudsman decisions, statutes, statutory instruments, conventions and treaties once again make it an invaluable and incomparable, easily searchable, reference book. Its generous appendices include extracts from, for example, the Care Act 2014 and the Local Authority Social Services Act 1970, which save readers from having to scrabble around with separate books and web pages to work with the frequent referencing and cross-referencing from the text and provide an ‘at-hand’ version of the legislation. Non-lawyers, however, may need to be reminded that textbooks are not updated and that Bailii or government legislation websites should always be checked for amendments.
Yet this is so much more than a legal reference book. It is not intended to be a ‘black letter law book’ for legal practitioners but is, exactly as it states on the back cover, ‘a definitive guide to adult social care law’. Approaching the book afresh from my new perspective of academic social care researcher, its accessibility and the power and importance of its narrative format become immediately apparent. It is actually a book you can sit down and read, as well as being an unbeatable source of fact, relevant legislation and case law.
Across its 20 chapters the book frames community care law firmly within its historical and present social context. It highlights the changes in social attitudes and policy intentions behind legislative changes and case law outcomes. It identifies and validates concerns about the political, social and financial pressures that may impact on the fact or extent of local authority (LA) compliance (see, for example, paragraph 9.4 regarding the lack of ‘new money’ to accompany the Care Act 2014 and the likely impact on any LA’s ability to implement the Care Act’s preventative duties). This is a book that truly engages with the context and reality of the community care sector from all perspectives. While giving a full and honest picture of the strict legislative and common law (case law) framework, the book also seeks to identify and share the most effective ways of holding the various parties (government, local authorities, NHS, care providers) to account not only through litigation-focused judicial review intervention (para. 20.139) but with detailed analysis of alternative routes to remedy – the local authority and NHS complaints process (para. 20.7) and the Local Government Ombudsman (para. 20.86). The book emphasises its practicality by even including precedent letters in the appendix – including a precedent formal complaint letter to social services.
It has been a fascinating experience for me in recent weeks to be using Community Care and the Law in a social care/disability academic research and teaching environment rather than as a solicitor. Waving the book in front of social work students to gasps of horror and despair at its size and ‘law-ness’, and then demonstrating to them its invaluable indexed accessibility – you want to know about independent living and human rights? These are in paragraphs 2.49–2.52. Direct payments? The index breaks those down into about 70 different topics. There is no doubt that the information you need is there, easy to find, set in the context of real-life cases and situations that are both easily identifiable and relatable by everyone from service users themselves to social care practitioners and lawyers.
The diversity of the book’s target audience is also reflected in the plentiful, generous and extensive use of academic texts; papers and journal extracts in the copious references which turn each individual page into a starting point for potentially endless further research if that is your intended use. The chapter on Continuing Health Care contains extensive referencing to key texts and documents such as the Social Care Institute for Excellence paper from February 2006, ‘Using Qualitative Research in Systematic Reviews: Older People’s Views of Hospital Discharge’ (468). Similarly, Department of Health Circulars, statutory instruments, Local Government Ombudsman (LGO) reports and King’s Fund and Joseph Rowntree publications are included with detailed and searchable referencing.
Copious superlatives aside, I am genuinely unsure that much else can be said about this book. The existing Legal Action Group reviews and the ‘comments’ published on the back cover absolutely reflect the truth that this book is indispensable and a genuinely worthwhile investment for anyone interested or working in community care, whether with adults, children, families, older people, healthcare or social care settings, and there is even a specific chapter for people working with people who are migrants and refugees (as well as relevant observations about these specific groups throughout the general text).
The authors did make a deliberate, and in my view, sensible decision to leave Welsh social/community care law out of the book in this edition and it is important to bear in mind when using it that the book does now ‘only’ cover English law, devolution having taken Welsh and Scottish social care in slightly different directions.
As set out in the book’s introduction this edition also steps away from covering the increasingly complex rights of disabled children, in respect of which we are helpfully signposted elsewhere. There are entries about the rights of child carers (para. 15.178), young people in transition (para. 15.195) and unaccompanied asylum-seeking children and destitute migrant families (para. 16.64), but the focus of Community Care and the Law is firmly on adult community care and at 942 pages as it is we should, I think, be grateful for that.
Norah Fry Centre for Disability Studies, School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
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© 2017 Caroline Miles
https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2017.1401331