Research, campaigns, and social investment across formal and informal care, including childcare and social care, exploring how to build a more caring society.
JRF wants to speed up a transition to an equitable future, free from poverty, where people and the planet can flourish. Care, family and relationships are central to this mission as we can’t build this future without properly valuing the act of care and making care systems fairer.
Care underpins our wellbeing, relationships and resilience to hardship. But it is undervalued in our society, reflected in issues like child poverty, loneliness and the high cost of caring.
Through our care programme, we’ll drive policy and system change in 3 areas:
1. Enable work alongside care
People should be able to care without financial penalty. This means proper paid leave, more flexible work, and a fairer distribution of caring responsibilities so women are not disproportionately affected.
2. Redesign care markets
Care is a public good but isn’t funded or treated like one. We need a system that improves outcomes for both workers and those receiving care, with funding and regulation that reflect its importance.
3. Empower people who care
Care work, paid and unpaid, is undervalued. We need better pay, stronger voices for carers, and improved ways of recognising care’s contribution to society.
This work connects to our focus on deep poverty and the labour market. Families with caring responsibilities face higher costs and barriers to work, so we must ensure social security and employment policies better support them.
Care responsibilities are individualised, unevenly shared and come with a significant financial penalty. Our research shows this ‘caring penalty’ can exceed £100,000 in lost gross pay over 6 years for mothers, and £30,000 for unpaid social care givers.
Undertaking care can push people into poverty, and unpaid carers are disproportionately more likely to be in poverty compared with those who don’t undertake unpaid care. Women deliver most care roles in the home (whether for children or other loved ones) and so are more affected by this imbalance.
Systems meant to share financial risk, such as the Child Maintenance Service, are falling short, with half of single-parent families in poverty. And our research on paternity leave shows how limited and unequal provision reinforces these inequalities.
