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This book explores the critical issue of how to manage the ever-increasing demand for social care in Britain’s ageing society. With informal care from family members and friends now the dominant form of adult social care in the UK, this precarious system is struggling to provide enough support.
Exploring the relationship between formal and informal care, this book develops ideas for a ‘caring economy’, showing the potential to integrate paid-for and unpaid care within a framework of solidarity based on the strengths of the community, working to improve the quality and quantity of state-funded care provision while sharing unpaid support more widely as a community responsibility.
1. Introduction
2. Survey evidence on paid and unpaid care
3. How can informal care be sustained?
4. Who pays? How much care should be free, what kinds and for whom?
5. Widening the caring circle: towards a caring economy
6. Solidarity projects: mutual aid, timebanks, community unions and volunteers
7. Reducing the need for care
8. Conclusions and solutions
Appendix A: Cost calculations and revenue sources for expanding subsidised care
Appendix B: Seniors’ different needs for help and how they are met
Appendix C: Stories of lived experience