Perspectives on safeguarding

There is much to welcome in the renewed national focus on adult safeguarding. It sits at the heart of social justice and is core to the work of local government in building strong and resilient communities that support those facing disadvantage.Baroness Louise Casey has rightly challenged us to ask some difficult questions about whether we really understand how effectively adults are safeguarded across the country, what ‘good' looks like and whether there is sufficient national oversight and accountability.The establishment of the National Safeguarding Board creates an opportunity to address some longstanding issues. Its work to update Care Act statutory guidance, strengthen oversight of Safeguarding Adults Boards and review whether our legislation and powers remain fit for purpose is important and overdue.Safeguarding is where social work is at its best. It involves balancing rights and risks, different perspectives and sometimes, competing responsibilities. Greater clarity for practitioners therefore matters.There is also more we can do nationally to develop a shared understanding of what good safeguarding looks like and how we should measure its effectiveness. Better data, clearer expectations and stronger mechanisms for learning across the country should help us improve. But as we embark on this work, we also need to be clear about what a National Safeguarding Board cannot do.The latest Association of Directors of Adult Social Services Spring Survey provides important context. Four out of five directors of adult social services reported an increase in safeguarding concerns over the last year and 88% reported that those concerns are becoming more complex.We can improve statutory guidance, but guidance cannot increase someone's income. We can strengthen Safeguarding Adults Boards, but a board cannot provide someone with a secure home. We can improve professional practice, but a social worker cannot remove the choices facing someone who is struggling to pay their bills and afford the support they need.Most strikingly, 64% said poverty had contributed to the increase in safeguarding concerns. That should make us stop and think differently about safeguarding.We understandably focus on what happens once a concern reaches the safeguarding system: thresholds, enquiries, partnership working, professional practice and whether agencies have fulfilled their responsibilities.All of those things matter. But they cannot be separated from the circumstances in which people are living.The same survey describes increasing safeguarding concerns involving people who are homeless or living in temporary accommodation, alongside the consequences of pressures elsewhere in health and care. Social care is not free.We see people juggling the cost of their care with the cost of food, housing, and clothing. Councils see people, including those fully funding their own care known as ‘self-funders', reducing the amount of care they purchase because of similar financial pressures.These are not problems that can be resolved through better safeguarding procedures.We can improve statutory guidance, but guidance cannot increase someone's income. We can strengthen Safeguarding Adults Boards, but a board cannot provide someone with a secure home. We can improve professional practice, but a social worker cannot remove the choices facing someone who is struggling to pay their bills and afford the support they need.Safeguarding is often where the consequences of wider social and economic pressures become visible.Poverty, insecure housing, access to health services, workforce pressures within the care market, can all impact on wellbeing and reduce our ability to protect ourselves from harm. At the same time, councils are being asked to respond to that growing risk with increasingly stretched resources. More than half of directors (54%) now have only partial or no confidence in their ability to meet their safeguarding duties in 2026-27.There is a danger that we ask safeguarding to manage risks which wider public policy has failed to prevent.None of this diminishes the importance of the National Safeguarding Board. Quite the opposite. We should use this renewed national attention to be more ambitious about safeguarding: giving practitioners greater clarity, improving accountability, understanding variation and learning much more effectively when things go wrong.But we should resist believing that the answer to rising safeguarding concerns lies solely in reforming the safeguarding system.If we are serious about preventing abuse and neglect, our response must extend beyond safeguarding structures and processes to the conditions which make us vulnerable to harm in the first place.The test of this renewed national focus should ultimately not be whether we have produced better guidance, better data or more consistent processes – important though all of those are. It should be whether fewer people experience avoidable harm.The National Safeguarding Board can help us get there. But it cannot get us there alone.Melanie Williams is executive director of adults and wellbeing at West Northamptonshire Council and former president of the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services

Title

ADULT SOCIAL CARE

Perspectives on safeguarding

By Melanie Williams | 24 September 2026

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