Local autonomy: what does it mean for social services?

The last of these posts that contain my thoughts on issues raised by the new Spanish social work journal, Azarbe.

An interesting question is raised for Britain about the social services legislation enacted by autonomous regions in Spain. If we want to devolve governments anywhere, as we are doing in the UK, what are the consequences of having diverging social care systems? A lot of countries, including the US and many European countries, have experience of this. 

In Britain people are worried about post-code lotteries, in which people in one area get better services because of the political choices in healthcare. They haven’t started to be concerned so much about social care, but perhaps they should be in view of the growing number of older people and the focus on cutting benefits and social services by our government (another example of putting the consequences of inadequate theories of economics onto the poor). You can't have real devolution without having differences in the services available in different places, and we need to work out this tension in every country's social care system.