The Social Work Awards 2023
It’s that time of year again!
The Social Work Awards 2023 will be on Friday, and I for one can’t wait, given that one of the things they like to do is give the general public an understanding of social work, and me being a general member of the public, i’m excited to see if I will learn something this year, doubtful.
So let’s start by taking a look at their accounts, these accounts are publicly available and cover from April 1st 2022 to March 31st 2023. So the accounts cover last years awards and the Parliamentary reception that was held earlier this year.
It also includes when everyone has been hit with the current cost of living crisis. Families cannot afford to eat, children are going hungry, foodbanks are seeing unprecedented demand. Wages are not increasing with inflation. Financially, things are grim for a lot of people right now.
Just to be clear, the accounts cover last years awards ceremony where this was what every single attendee had as their dinner menu:
Twice Baked Montgomery Cheddar cheese soufflé, wild mushrooms, soft herbs and a Dijon mustard sauce watercress oil
Sorrel rusted canon of lamb, wilted spinach and roast celeriac, fondant potato, minted lamb jus
Morello cherry meringue, Jivara Cremeux, blackcurrant brownies
Coffee & Petit fours
The wines:
Casa Albali Verdejo – Sauvignon Blanc
Casa Albali Tempranillo Shiraz
This is the income and expenditure for the 2022 Social Work Awards
Income is from sponsorship and ticket sales, expenditure is on the PR company and hosting the event.
As you can see they raised £247,304 from sponsorship and ticket sales for the 2022 awards, this is £100,000 more than they raised for the year before. That said, the 2021 event was held virtually, which will impact the expenditure more than the income.
Most of that money is public money, money that should be spent on services for the public but instead is going to be spend on a huge big luxury party night, food which costs a fortune, and the self indulgence of many.
I’m certain that a foodbank would gladly accept the amount of money that is going to be spent on the food and wine alone, to feed families who are quite literally starving.
So does anyone make money from making the Social Work Awards bigger and more expensive each year?
Yes, yes they do.
The bigger the event, the more money PLMR Genesis, the PR company who put on the awards make. So it is in their best interests to put effort into raising more money and putting on a bigger event each year, as they will need to do more work, and they get paid more.
In fact, they have been given a pay rise
PLMR Genesis run the entire awards, they do everything, and they get paid for it. The registered address for the Social Work Awards is the address of PLMR Genesis.
This is what was spent on raising money in the 2022 awards cycle. That isn’t the cost of putting on the awards event and the parliamentary reception, this is just the cost of organising it, so not the cost of the venue or the food, but the cost of PLMR’s time where they dealt with contractors and made decisions about what the event was going to look like.
I am not an accountant, so I cannot be totally sure if PLMR Genesis got paid the whole of that £67,554, or just most of it. I don’t know if design and print is costs for printing the books they give out at the awards, or if it’s what PLMR genesis charge for putting the effort into sorting out the books before they go and get printed.
At the very least they must be getting that £41,600 for event organisation, it’s probably more from the other two categories as well, as I said, i’m not an accountant.
There is also this
On the surface it looks like an altruistic act, donating a huge amount of money like that to a worthwhile charity, but on two counts that isn’t 100% true. Firstly, that £39,900 is a tax write off, which means while PLMR Genesis didn’t get paid that money from The Social Work Awards, they paid £39,900 less tax than they would have had they not donated their time. So PLMR were not out of pocket at all, and they can also brag about making a charity donation. This was something I did check with an accountant, as I wanted to be sure that a charitable donation is a tax write off.
Secondly, the social work awards is not a worthwhile charity.
Given that PLMR Genesis organise, and run the whole of the awards from beginning to end, they do have a vested interest in making the event more expensive to put on. Let’s be honest, even if the awards were doing any good and they were a proper charity, there is no need for such an extravagant event.
The money raised is mostly public money, those buying the tickets are mostly buying them with public money. Given that the charity is all about “blah blah, stopping poverty” or some rubbish like that, you’d expect they would do everything they could to put on the awards as cheaply as possible.
Given that the costs have increased year on year with little change in the event, apart from more expensive surroundings, more expensive food, not a lot has changed that would account for this, they just decided they were going to increase donations and spend more money on the event.
Surely it would be more in keeping with the current cost of living crisis to be serving food that the general public will have eaten before instead of it all being high class fancy.
This is what the charity has put in it’s accounts to justify the increase in spending, at least my guess is that is why this is included, i’m not an accountant.
Trust me, if I got a free very expensive meal and wine, i’d be giving something the top rating I could. Those attending aren’t paying for anything, public money is, so it’s all free for them.
Media coverage reached 6.23 million people with 109 published articles (up 40%)
The awards are only for those in England, there are about 56 million people in England. You can take away 25% of that for those under 18, I estimated that percentage, but whatever.
So 42 million adults. That is before you exclude those who don’t go online, those who are severely disabled, those who have severe cognitive problems who are not able to be ‘reached’, those who totally despise social media, and those who a social work article would never ever reach because they have no interest.
So 1 in 7 of everyone in England was ‘reached’ with at least 1 of the 109 published articles. I bet none of those articles were mine, despite my writing extensively on the subject. I’m going to guess most of those articles were ones that winning LA’s published on their media themselves, and others involved published.
If you walked into an Amazon warehouse and asked how many people have heard of the Social Work Awards, do you really think that 1 in 7 are going to have heard of them? I have yet to meet anyone who has heard of them, i’m just a member of the public, it’s only those who are in social work who will have heard of them, and their loved ones.
That clearly is a load of rubbish that 1 in 7 people in England have been reached with only 109 articles published. I’m guessing saying ‘reached’ is deliberately vague. What does it even mean? Where do they get those figures from?
Almost all mentions of the social work awards are just someone being congratulated for winning, or getting through to the final. What value does that have to the public? What value does being “reached” by a list of winners bring to those in England?
Given that PLMR Genesis are in charge of the entirety of the Social Work Awards, it makes a blog I made last year make a bit more sense to me. In that blog I shared the following images.
This first one shows the manager of the Essex Social Care Academy being proud of those who are shortlisted and tagging people. Two of those people worked at that time for PLMR Genesis and were running the event. One is the ECSA and the other one is someone high up at ECC social care. I said at the time that it is clear she is very close with those putting on the event.
Again I said at the time that at the very least the manager at the Essex Social Care Academy had been trying to cheat, that much is clear. What is a bit murky is whether she was successful in trying to cheat, as ‘discreet professionals’ could mean that they have told her but they are being discreet about it.
It is clearly worth it for PLMR Genesis to keep the manager happy, as all the nominations for Essex go through the ESCA, and ECC are a huge sponsor and ticket buyer, they have probably flushed another £17,000 of public money down the toilet tonight.
What I was also very interested to find out is that PLMR Genesis have gotten some work out of ECC, including landing a contract to try and increase the number of foster carers in Essex
So the Essex Social Care Academy manager who admitted in a twitter post that she tried repeatedly to get the names of those who were finalists early, and who knows at least two of the team that host the awards, is the manager of the children’s social workers at the ESCA, so that would cover fostering.
They state in that screenshot which is on their website that ECC approached them.
The deciding on the finalists and who wins is done by others and not PLMR Genesis, but as they run the event they are going to know what the judges are looking for each year, and who knows what else.
The manager repeatedly contacted them to ask them to tell her who the finalist were, what would have happened with any other awards, or anything competitive, would be a smackdown, after the first time they should have told her that asking that was unacceptable and to please never ask again. Instead they allowed her to do this repeatedly, and she wouldn’t have asked repeatedly if she didn’t think there was a chance they would tell her.
PLMR Genesis also got another contract from ECC, that one isn’t to do with social care, but those that run the social work awards where ECC win about 5 awards per year, have been awarded at least two contracts by Essex County Council.
That is food for thought.