The UK’s new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, has made a commitment to fixing social care – something that previous prime ministers have been ducking for several decades, despite having commissioned repeated reviews and given verbal promises to do something.
On BBC Radio4’s Today programme on 30th July, I shared my perspective on social care reform. I made the point that we need a paradigm shift from viewing social care as a burden to seeing it as a collective necessity.
We need to recognize that it is normal to both give and receive care throughout our lives. This necessitates moving away from a neoliberal valorization of ‘independence’ and recognizing that our security is fundamentally shaped by our relationships with others.
We need to create a National Care Service as essential insurance for our collective (and unpredictable) future. With the number of people aged 65+ predicted to reach 10 million by the mid-2060s, the reality is that the vast majority of us will eventually need care of some kind.
By contributing to a publicly funded system now, we ensure good quality and affordable care when it is our turn to be vulnerable.
Social care is NOT an unaffordable expense. Instead, investment in this vital social infrastructure creates a virtuous circle: for instance, every £1 invested in supporting carers has been shown to save local authorities £5.90 in reduced crisis costs.
And investing in the care economy is a powerful economic driver, creating more jobs and higher tax revenue than equivalent spending in sectors like construction, while simultaneously freeing up family members (and let’s remember that these are disproportionately women) to participate in the wider workforce, increasing productivity.
Finally, a National Care Service will end the broken and fragmented so-called social care market where private equity firms extract profit from the care of the vulnerable. We need a well-resourced, not-for-profit system that treats care as a public good rather than a commodity.
A National Care Service is a fundamental underpinning of a good society – turning it from a utopian dream into a practical plan based on evidence-led policy and social solidarity.
If you want to hear my actual words, they are about 2 hours and 45 minutes into the programme and last for a minute or two!
The BBC programme: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/favourites/m002zjcs
This blog has been reposted from Substack: https://wilkinsonpickett.substack.com/p/the-good-society-is-a-caring-society
