Who will care?: How can we meet the scale of the care challenge?

This paper traces the history around care transformation over the last century, and explores the ways in which the work of caring is undervalued and therefore politically sidelined. 

Progressives need to see a better future for care as both a necessity and an opportunity to shape a critical future public service. In practice, this will mean turning the existing patchwork of paid care into a functioning, reliable and affordable public service – not through incremental changes but through transformation, by scaling good quality provision and finding a way to pay for care which has political and economic backing.

We call for progressives to look beyond paid services and listen to the human wish to care, embedding real choice into the system – not to renege on state responsibility but to widen its scope to the labour market and beyond. 

The short-term payoff will be a chance to form an alternative politics of family and deliver tangible improvements in economic security and trust. The long-term payoff is for the legacy of a new care settlement to be claimed by progressives, and for that system to really transform the lives of the many who need it.