“You only hear negative things, like people being abused in care.” That comment, by a participant in a major research project on public perceptions of social care, goes to the heart of the image problem that undoubtedly hobbles any attempt to build a popular campaign on the sector’s behalf. But there are other important reasons for social care’s continued failure to punch its weight in the political and policy worlds – a failure demonstrated all too clearly by ministers’ casual excuse of repeated delays in publication of the promised green paper on reform. And if the sector is ever to break free of its subordinacy, it has to understand what they are.
CREATING A STRONG VOICE I have been writing about social care for the Guardian for three decades. When I first took on the brief, as part of a wider correspondent’s role then called ‘social services’, I was puzzled about where the sector’s leadership lay. It took a long time for me to realise that it didn’t lie anywhere. It’s not an original observation to say that the lack of a single, strong voice for social care is a big part of its difficulty. So the fact that the sector has not addressed the issue, or certainly not come up with any solution, should be worrying. Yes, there are healthily competing interests among providers, commissioners, users’ and carers’ groups and regulators, but it ought not be beyond their collective wit and artifice to devise something that articulates a common cause. Sadly, recent evidence suggests it may be. Attempts were made in 2016 to launch a ‘social movement for social care’, intended to build pressure for a game-changing funding breakthrough in the 2020 spending review, but the initiative petered out. The threefold aim had been to ‘lift the veil’ on social care, raising public awareness of what it is and popularising what it does; to make the link between social care and a sustainable NHS in terms politicians could understand; and to mobilise a broad-based campaign that put social
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CMM June 2019
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