Research, campaigns, and social investment across formal and informal care, including childcare and social care, exploring how to build a more caring society.
Care underpins our wellbeing, relationships and resilience to hardship. Through our care programme, we'll drive policy and system change in 3 areas:
Care responsibilities are unevenly shared and too often come with a significant financial penalty, which disproportionately affects women and unpaid carers. At the same time, an underfunded social care system leaves too many people facing high and unpredictable costs when they need support most.
We need to build public understanding of why social care funding needs reform, making the case for a fairer system that shares costs more evenly and ensures everyone can access the care they need without being pushed into hardship.
As more of us live longer lives, more of us will need social care. Yet our current system leaves many people facing high and unpredictable costs, often at the point when they are most vulnerable. While support is available for those with the lowest means, many older people with modest savings or housing wealth receive little help and can face substantial care bills. This can leave people making difficult choices between paying for care and covering everyday essentials, while growing pressure on families and unpaid carers risks leaving more people without the support they need.
A fairer social care system would spread costs more evenly across society, so people are not left to bear the financial impact of care needs alone. Other countries have shown that it is possible to share costs more fairly through a combination of public funding, contributions based on ability to pay and stronger protections against catastrophic costs. Reforming the funding of social care is essential to ensuring everyone can access the care they need.
