Ending the Social Care Crisis: A New Road to Reform

What is social care for? What does good care and support look like; and what level and quality of help should we reasonably expect?

The costs and benefits of good social care are distributed unevenly over time:

Risk-pooling

Lesson 5: Don’t begin with the hard stuff

driving up performance and quality through a new independent regulator of providers – the new General Social Care Council – and performance assessment – the ‘star ratings’ of councils.

we started to get a clear sense not that either party desperately wanted to say yes, but that neither wanted to be the one that said no. Quite often we thought all the signals were that one party was lining up to say no, but when the moment came, it didn’t. The policy was being kept alive because neither party could be the one to say no to it. The

The UK’s first-past-the-post voting system of ‘winner takes all’ is not conducive to pragmatic cross-party deals that are common in many European countries.

This new department will … reach far beyond the discovery and rescue of social casualties; it will enable the greatest possible number of individuals to act reciprocally, giving and receiving service for the well-being of the whole community’ (Committee on Local Authority and Allied Personal Social Services, 1968). The resulting legislation – the L

For many, it is less about a narrow range of functional care needs and more about help and support to live independently, to maintain friendships and social networks in the place we live, to hold down a job or attend college or university.