What I mean to say: fit for purpose

Just before Christmas, UK Children’s Minister Tim Loughton commissioned a review of the adoption process. His advisor, Martin Narey, had become “exercised …. about (the) parental assessment process which is”, he said, “not fit for purpose”.

 ‘Not fit for purpose’ is, as far as I can work out, a recently invented cliché. I suppose a cliché by definition should have a certain vintage, maturing through over use from meaningful observation into banality. But some words and phrases are quicker to triteness than others, and ‘not fit for purpose’ has made the journey at the double.
 
Take away the negative, add a question mark and we are left with ‘fit for purpose?’ a routine quality assurance test. But whereas ‘fit for purpose?’ is asked of a specific part of a process, a cog in a system of wheels, ‘not fit for purpose’ is an adjective applied to the organisations on which society has come to rely.
 
Its intention is to shock. The Home Office, prior to its break up, was ‘not fit for purpose’. The European Union, say the eurosceptics, is ‘not fit for purpose’. The failure is not a part of the organisation, a department or leader, it is the whole damn system. ‘Blimey, I didn’t know that, thank goodness someone is going to put it right’ is the requisite response.
 
The riposte should be ‘what purpose’. The European Union seems to be implicated in near-on 70 years of peace in a continent that has specialised in war, so maybe it is suited to this purpose. On the economic front, capabilities are rightly being questioned.
 
The purpose in doubt with respect to adoption is its ability to supply middle class childless couples with healthy children from working class homes. As Minister Loughton put it,
"We cannot afford to sit back and lose potential adoptive parents when there are children who could benefit hugely from the loving home they can provide”.

 
Another purpose of children’s services is to ensure that working class parents are not deprived, because of temporary incapacity, from the opportunity of providing a warm supportive upbringing for their children. Another is to weigh the risks of things going wrong with the birth family against things going wrong with a foster or adoptive family. That middle class families are as vulnerable as working class families to incapacity or death, and as able to screw up their children, or to be screwed up by their children, is one of the great inconveniences of modernity.
 
Social workers are being asked to make life changing, in some cases, life saving decisions. I am sure I would, as Narey put it, ‘meander’, when faced with such huge choices. And I might slow to a complete halt if my decisions were constantly being questioned by unqualified people like me, the Minister or Narey.
 
What the high ups can do is to be clear about the purpose and to stop second guessing ‘fitness’. With a bit more clarity, maybe the practitioners would have more confidence to act.