Andy Burnham meets care home residents in north London after social care speech (Image: PA / Kirsty Wrigglesworth)
Andy Burnham has made an encouraging start as Prime Minister by putting social care back on the national agenda. After years of reviews, commissions and promises of reform, his commitment to tackle an issue that successive governments have ducked should be welcomed. The challenge now is turning that ambition into a system that reflects modern family life. Britain’s families have changed, but too much of our social care system still hasn’t caught up.
If there is one issue that deserves to sit near the top of the Prime Minister’s in-tray, it is the growing pressure on Britain’s unpaid carers. They are the sons, daughters, husbands, wives and partners holding together a care system that too often only steps in once a family has reached crisis point. Unless reform starts with their experience, we risk talking once again about structures, funding and bureaucracy while overlooking the people carrying the greatest burden.
At Home Instead, we’ve tracked attitudes to ageing and care through our New Ageing Index over the past 18 months. What we’ve found isn’t simply frustration with the current system. It is a public becoming less willing to accept that when an ageing parent needs help, there is only one way of accessing it.
The statistic that concerns me most isn’t about funding – it’s that, in just 18 months, the proportion of family carers telling us they need more support looking after an ageing parent has risen from 68% to 77%. Polling doesn’t usually move like that. Today’s carers are increasingly part of multi-generational families, supporting ageing parents while still working and often helping children too. They are balancing responsibilities that previous generations rarely faced all at once. Anyone supporting a loved one with dementia will recognise that picture. Care builds gradually until families find themselves juggling appointments, medication, paperwork and countless new responsibilities.
Yet our system still tends to step in only once families reach crisis point. That’s why the debate needs to move beyond who provides care to a much simpler question: what choices do families actually have? Our research shows the number of people who would consider funding their own care has risen from 46% to 50% in just 18 months. Among family carers, the figure remains above 60%.
More than half believe state waiting lists are too long, while four in ten believe independent providers offer greater choice than state provision, rising to more than half among family carers. I don’t read these figures as a rejection of public services. I read them as families trying to regain a sense of control – they want genuine choice over how care is organised, funded and delivered.
That isn’t a criticism of the people working in social care. It is a recognition that the system remains incredibly difficult to navigate. Local eligibility, assessment processes and routes into care all vary, leaving families to make life-changing decisions under enormous emotional pressure. Other countries do things differently. Australia, for example, offers families a single government-backed platform explaining funding, entitlement and approved providers.
Andy Burnham has spoken about creating a social care system that is built around people rather than institutions. If that ambition is to become reality, reform must give families confidence in the choices available to them, wherever they live. Government should set clear standards, provide trusted information and make the system far easier to navigate. Local leaders should then have the flexibility to bring together councils, the NHS and trusted care providers in ways that reflect the needs of their communities.
Families need support backed by trusted information, consistent standards and a system that helps people find the right care before they reach breaking point, not afterwards.
Andy Burnham has rightly recognised that social care can no longer be left for another day. That alone represents a welcome change. Now comes the harder task: building a system that reflects the reality of modern family life. One that supports unpaid carers earlier, prevents families reaching crisis and gives people genuine choice over how they receive and fund care.
If Andy Burnham can deliver that, he won’t simply have reformed social care. He will have transformed the experience of growing older in Britain.
Ruth Brown is Managing Director of Home Instead