A friend of mine is the CEO of a large successful international business and it has been interesting to compare challenges over these difficult times.

Much has been made about the ease of managing in the public sector compared with the private sector, especially around changes in demand, customer base and sustainability.

My question to him has been: ‘If you had a requirement to improve or maintain the existing quality and quantity of your service to your customers, while at the same time your entire customer base states a non-negotiable requirement to reduce your cost to them by 43%, how would you do it?'

One of his more helpful responses was: ‘I would find another customer base'.  How would you square this circle in social care?

We need to remember that there is not a simple commodity behind the business of social work.  Social services works to improve the lives of vulnerable adults and children.

What is the answer?  If we accept the following two conflicting trajectories, social services is arguably increasingly more accountable for every social ill that befalls our society and a head-first fall towards the means we have available to meet this demand being taken away, we can begin to build a framing that allows us to more clearly see the test we face.

In The Five Giants, Nicholas Timmins portrays the changing nature of the welfare state as ‘giant want'; ‘giant disease'; ‘giant ignorance'; ‘giant squalor' and the insidious ‘giant idleness', ‘which destroys wealth and corrupts men'.

These were evils to be vanquished by the post-war reconstruction of Britain, and lead to the five gargantuan programmes that made up the core of Beveridge's welfare state.

These were social security, health, education, housing and a policy of full employment. However, he also writes that ‘every design has unintended consequences'.

In previously less successful economies that had a long history of low levels of public service, how did their children, older people, families and communities cope?  What did they do with so much less than us?

These were local communities that exhibited community spirit and charity for each other, not with the expectation of receiving something else in return.

We need a culture that understands the importance of local communities that look out for each other.  We need to understand that civic duty and civic pride is something good and honourable and a sense of community is not only a good thing, it keeps people alive, well and without it, people perish.

Sound familiar? Have a chat with your grandparents.  Ask them about 1948, post-war Britain.  In an attempt to try and look after a traumatised nation's people, the welfare state was born.

This turned the UK overnight into a caring and nurturing nation.  However, over subsequent generations three key issues have emerged

The first is increased cost and volume pressure on a system designed to hold much less.

The second is the unintended consequence of effectively shackling and harnessing sections of people into an endless cycle of a disempowered monotony of existence, receiving low value services, developing dependencies and being comfortable with state hand-outs.

The third is a slow corrosion in the sense of community many places took for granted and which has been lost due to economic, demographic and cultural shifts.  These shifts make society much more mobile and much less place-based.

We are working closely with iMPOWER to pull together a dynamic prevention strategy for children's and family services in Bexley.

We have also agreed a working hypothesis; that the over-reliance on the welfare state as the answer to everything is demanding that we take a new perspective on an old principle.

Learning from lessons from taking a social work- based community development focus of mutual trust independence and self-sufficiency, we can develop a new model of social work; one that places relationships with individuals, families and neighbourhoods at its heart, engendering self-help and self-respect.

This core social work principle has been watered down over the past decade, as the traditional prescription state-centred model that is cornerstone of the welfare state, has taken predominance.  My call to action is for us to take our social work person-centred profession back.

This is the potential big idea that should be driving the integration of ‘people-based services', but needs liberated and forward-thinking councils to enable their DASS/DCS to develop these strategies.

We are interested in anyone or any organisation that would also like to be a part of this movement or feels that they could assist in any way to try and expand this thinking.

We are seeking stories about communities or neighbourhoods that have potentially bridged the gap between the dependent and interdependent communities, to try and establish a model of what a potentially new neighbourhood or community in the UK could look like.

Together, by building a new community for change in social work, we can reinvent neighbourhoods based on the image of what we were meant to be.

Mark Charters is director for education and social care at Bexley LBC (email: mark.charters@bexley.gov.uk)