The social sector in Malta has seen unprecedented growth these last seven years.

Reality shows that, in the final analysis, what we can do in the caring professions from medicine and health to education to social services and long-term care and to fully integrating persons with different abilities into local communities cannot be achieved unless the fundamentals of any country’s economy are right.

In 2012 Malta’s GDP was €7.36bn whereas in 2019 it stood at €13.39bn, an increase of 81.9 per cent. Likewise, the national budget increased from €2.07bn in 2012 to €5.9bn in 2020 while the social solidarity budget increased from €1.047bn to €1.829bn – an increase of 74.68 per cent.

This money has gone on yearly increases in pensions, children’s allowances and the child in care benefit, the latter aiming to encourage more people to foster children who are removed from their families and need an alternative family. The tapering of benefits for people who were on the dole and the in-work benefit for people on a low income and needed to supplement their earnings to keep their children in education, even at post-secondary level have helped thousands of people get into and remain in employment. The tapering of benefits has been estimated to have enabled 7,000 people get off benefits and join the active labour force. Likewise, the introduction of free childcare, healthy and free school breakfasts and the extension of free after-school tuition.

This has led to our country making significant inroads in the fight to eradicate poverty.

… investing in people

The Foundation for Social Welfare Services (FSWS), as Malta’s national agency for social services provision, has benefitted from this positive economic situation. Our budget has increased by more than three-fold from €6,474,000 to €21,400,000 between 2012 and 2020. This has enabled us to increase our workforce from 375 to 917. Of these, 75 per cent are fully qualified professionals who do direct client work ranging from social work to psychological assessments, through to youth work and community work and family therapy for multi-stressed families in their homes.

The home-based family therapy is one of the many services we introduced to deal with emerging needs or to fulfil legal obligations such as the risk-assessment professionals who carry out the DASH Risk Assessment when cases of domestic violence are reported to us or the police. We have re-established our presence in Gozo after long years of absence. In Gozo we have a presence in Victoria from where we offer most of our services and a base in Marsalforn where we are working with the local council and other players on the ground to help a community which has grown rapidly and risks becoming a ghetto of social problems if not addressed in a timely manner. We have managed to employ full-timers to run the national support line 179 and engaged full-time personnel to carry out supervised access visits for non-custodial separated parents.

Our investment in our people to serve better the most vulnerable in society is not complete. We still have a long way to go. We have started introducing evidence-based practice and outcome measures for our service users. Our directors and managers are insisting with their teams that care plans must be regularly reviewed and updated according to changing circumstances – but that keeping client cases open for years or without agreed outcomes is not an option.

We are not alone in all this. Together with our ministry, we have entered into 50 public social partnership (PSP) agreements with various NGOs in the social sector to deliver services to vulnerable people. These PSPs now cost €10m annually. In 2012 there were only three PSPs with a budget of just €3m.

Money by itself does not solve problems but ensures we have the resources to work with. We are using public money and have to be accountable for every euro we use by making optimum use of it. That said, we are in a good place. Indeed, in our contacts with similar service providers abroad, even on mainland Europe, we hear only one word: austerity. When we share our experiences, we are lucky to be able to speak of prosperity with a purpose.