In a commentary published by the Centre for Care, Director Professor Kate Hamblin responded to UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s speech on 29th July, outlining his approach to social care change, with three key actions:
1. To ask Baroness Casey to bring forward the report of her commission by a year, accelerating the timescale from 2028 to support the design of a National Care Service.
2. To immediately focus on the social care workforce.
3. To start cross-party talks today.
The Centre for Care has written to Andy Burnham outlining our evidence-based recommendations for social care reform.
In our letter we included recommendations from seven key areas of our research, which are crucial for the government to consider in its forthcoming plans. We have pulled our recommendations from the letter below, if you would like to read the full communication to the Prime Minister- which includes links to our research and key policy documents- please click here to download the Word document.
1. The care ‘ecosystem’ – the complex myriad of services, policies and systems that influence (social) care
Key recommendations:
- Central government must provide an adequate, long-term funding settlement for adult social care based on a transparent calculation of the level of eligible need under the Care Act 2014.
- Local authorities should consider the balance of spending in their social care budgets, ensuring sufficient funding is allocated to the community assets which enable people to live independently for longer and thrive at home.
- Adult social care policy should be developed in dialogue with other policy areas which underpin flourishing local ecosystems – including housing, welfare benefits and pensions, employment rights, and immigration.
- It is important to note that community organisations and networks are under pressure after over a decade of austerity and rising inequalities. Source: Evidence submission to the House of Commons Health and Social Care Select Committee inquiry on Adult social care reform: the costs of inaction.
2. People’s experiences of care and support
Key recommendations:
- Design proactive pathways: Rather than reacting to crisis points, social care services should establish planned transition support during major life changes—such as moving from education to employment, entering or leaving relationships, or shifting between children’s and adult services.
- Support transnational family care networks: Recognise that care often happens across national borders and expand family reunification schemes beyond nuclear families, and ease citizenship pathways for older refugees
- Fund specialist providers, adapt mainstream care for cultural needs (like food and personal care), and provide active anti-racist training across the NHS and care systems.
- National policy must establish clear, consistent definitions for Disability Related Expenses (DRE) and income disregards across all local authorities, while raising the Minimum Income Guarantee (MIG) to properly reflect the true cost of living for disabled people.
- Prioritise co-design and dialogue to ensure digital devices and technology enabled care services address the issues that really matter to people.
3. Unpaid carers
Key recommendations
- Health, respite and burnout prevention: Our work shows many carers are providing high-intensity care while their own health is under strain, and that lack of breaks or replacement care makes arrangements fragile. Carers need regular, dependable respite, help to attend their own appointments, and quick substitute care when something changes.
- Financial security and protection from the costs of caring: Carers worry about day-to-day costs, about the inadequacy and rigidity of Carer’s Allowance, the risk of overpayments debt, and about the long-term hit to pensions and savings (which is highly gendered). Policy should reduce, not reproduce, the financial penalties of caring — through better-calibrated allowances, recognition of intensity/hours, and protection for pension rights. We recommend a comprehensive review of welfare entitlements for carers, and that the DWP make more rapid progress implementing the recommendations of the Sayce Review.
- Employment rights, flexibility and paid carers’ leave: Many carers want or need to stay in work; what pushes them out is inflexible jobs and unpaid leave. A statutory right to paid carers’ leave for all workers, plus carer-aware flexible working, helps people stay in employment, protects income, and is cost-effective compared with letting carers exit the labour market.
- These needs for respite, income, employment rights, and accessible service- and the policy levers that will address them – should be brought together in a new, cross-government national carers strategy that aligns social care, health, employment and social security, and makes clear that carers are part of the care system, not an add-on.
- Use data and evidence to understand the unpaid carer population – such national policy and legislative change has to be coupled with more effective local planning to provide the bespoke services and supports where carers live and provide care. Local areas – councils, ICBs and local carer organisations – need to understand their carer population – both now and likely trends into the future – clearly, so they can target support.
4. The paid adult social care care workforce
Key recommendations:
- Strengthen local authority commissioning: Increase local authorities’ capacity to commission effectively and shape social care markets. Ethical and outcome-based commissioning should be prioritised to ensure fair pay, better working conditions, and high-quality care.
- Address policy trade-offs: Policymakers must acknowledge and actively manage tensions between personalisation and professionalisation by co-designing solutions with care workers, providers, and service users.
- Invest in workforce stability and development: Sustainable funding must support fair wages, career progression, and workforce well-being. This includes addressing mental health challenges, job security, and training opportunities to create a resilient workforce.
- Integrate social care with a workforce-centric Approach: Integration policies should move beyond structural reforms to focus on practical workforce alignment, fair pay, and seamless collaboration across health and social care.
5. Digital care, technology and innovation
Key recommendations:
- Design policy and commission devices and services based on outcomes: what people need to enable them to live well and provide better care, and understand how technologies – wide ranging and not always ‘care technologies’ – might support those ambitions.
- Design and commission devices and associated support for diversity and accessibility
- Technologies will always need people – technologies cannot ‘care’ without human labour, so understanding and resourcing good wraparound services to install, maintain and respond are key.
- Always ask ‘who wins, and who loses’, only scaling tools that equitably and sustainably enhance the lives of people receiving and providing care.
- Continue to offer ‘offline’ options to ensure people who cannot or will not use digital services and devices are not unfairly disadvantaged.
6. Care data infrastructure
Key recommendations:
- Improve the way that social care data are collected, stored, analysed, reported and made publicly available.
- Improve the accessibility of social care data for the public, policy makers and practitioners, for example by developing tools such as decision tools, dashboards and visualisations. Source: Unpaid Care Dashboard.
7. Children and families
Key recommendations:
- Invest in prevention and family support. National government should provide sustained funding for early help, family hubs, youth and community services, anti-poverty support and intensive edge-of-care interventions. Families should be able to access practical help before difficulties escalate, without long waits or restrictive thresholds.
- Place kinship care at the centre of children’s social care. Kinship carers should have access to financial, legal, practical and emotional support comparable to that available to other families caring for children who cannot live with their parents. Every local authority should use local data and lived experience to strengthen its Kinship Local Offer, ensuring that support is accessible regardless of the legal form of the arrangement.
- Learn from areas where criminalisation of children in care is lower. National and local government should identify, evaluate and spread effective local practice, including coordinated, trauma-aware support, diversion and safeguarding, reduced reliance on police in children’s homes, and timely information-sharing between services.
