Social care is the Tiny Tim of public policy. We all care about it and want the best for it, but somehow it always gets Scrooged by successive policymakers of all political colours. If any policy should be a candidate for some Christmas treats, it has to be social care.
So here is my seasonal present list to make sure social care and all of us who work in it and need it have a happy new year. Hopefully, you’ll bring others to the party.
The revaluing of care workers
Instead of being treated like failed supermarket shelf stackers, it is time their skills and commitment were rewarded with a living wage and real opportunities for good training, supervision, support and a proper career, rather than zero-hours contracts and minimal prospects.
A strong and independent voice for social care
At the moment, the loudest voices seem to be leaders of residential services and for-profit organisations; sadly not the most innovative members of the sector. This year also saw the silencing of the College of Social Work, losing the one new voice that had been created in this field. What’s needed is the gift of a powerful and united voice for social care, including on equal terms frontline workers, service users and family carers.
A new narrative
Long overdue is the gift of a new narrative for social care that is no longer framed in terms of the “burden” of older and disabled people and how much social care support costs. Instead, we need a narrative that recognises the productive and wealth-creating nature of jobs and services that support people to live independently, help them deal with any difficulties they face and prevent their conditions getting worse.
Community support
This Christmas package is small but perfectly formed. It is the realisation that if there is good enough support in the community, for people to stay in their own homes, with schemes for 24-hour care and a return to positive roles like home helps, then more people would have the confidence to live independently rather than have to go into an institutional setting.
New media values
We need to get rid of press preoccupation with institutional care, the problems of “bed blocking” and overloaded A&E departments and all that’s seen to be wrong with social care and its service users. Instead, the media should demand for social care the same political priority as the NHS and run stories about the many pioneering community-based initiatives emerging from social care – despite all its difficulties.
Service user involvement
Successive governments have talked up user involvement over the last 20 years. They have added a thesaurus of new jargon, empowerment, co-production, partnership, personalisation, most of which has little meaning for many service users. They talk instead of tokenism, tick-boxes, rubber-stamping decisions already made and being all consulted out. So here’s to a parcel covered in fairy dust which converts inaccessible rhetoric into participatory reality.
Welfare reform
Instead of the present arbitrary, cruel cuts, associated with deaths, suicide and despair and which undermine all the empowering aspirations of social care, this would be reform as the creators of the post-war welfare state understood it. It would mean improved access to education, training, decent jobs and support for others, in a world which puts the rights and needs of people before the economic imperatives of the market.
Multinational corporations
Now here’s a present I am sure will bring much satisfaction to the giver, bringing that warm glow which comes from realising how much better it is to give than receive.
This is a self-denying ordinance on the part of the moneymakers, finance houses, multinational corporations and private equity companies that have got involved in social care in increasing numbers. It is a realisation that the lives of older and disabled people are just too important, too precious to be a vehicle for their deregulated financial models that entail large debt, little tax, minimal transparency and accountability and no security for service users. Glimpsing the ghost of Christmas Future, they see that getting older and acquiring an impairment can happen to anyone, including them, and develop a new commitment to the philosophy of person-centred support.
Make social care really social
There is one more gift of understanding we must not forget. The clue is in the name social care. Social it might be called, but much of the thinking and provision we have is still based on an individualistic medical model. This is framed in terms of only offering support if people can’t do things, rather than ensuring support is there to make it possible for them to live as full a life as possible. The social model of disability offered the first such insight many Christmases ago, but we still have a long way to go for it to be the everyday experience of most service users and their families.
A few years back when I criticised the Dilnot commission for failing to consider as one of its options funding social care from general taxation, one of its members said that I must believe in Santa Claus. Well, nothing else seems to be working to sort out social care.
So in this season of goodwill, when every child knows that Father Christmas is on his way high above the rooftops in his sleigh, I am happy to plead guilty. And I hope that in his sacks of presents, he has found room for the greatest gift of all for social care – a service free at the point of delivery, available to all without means-testing and properly paid for from a progressive system of taxation. When that day comes we will all once more be able to believe in Christmas and look forward to a happy new year.
What are your wishes for social care in 2016? Tweet us on @GdnSocialCare or let us know in the comments section – we’ll use the best in an article.
