ABSTRACT
This chapter helps practitioners make sense of values, particularly in relation to poverty and exclusion, and to enable them to examine their own value base in the face of specific moral challenges that they face. Social workers have long been ambivalent in their values and attitudes toward poverty and social exclusion. Social work's casework tradition and commitment to social justice are intertwined, but face challenges from welfare reform and the re-emergence of the concept of the underclass in government policy. Commitments in the 1960s to build preventive services to help families in poverty and to universalise social work services in comprehensive local authority departments moved on to include more explicit anti-poverty objectives. Social workers engage largely with those in the bottom income quartile, and it is those on the lowest income who suffer directly from exclusionary inequality that should be the focus of fairness according to justice principles.
