Andy Burnham is right to put social care at the heart of the political debate. He’s also right to say politicians shouldn’t “flinch” from difficult conversations about funding.
But if social care reform becomes yet another argument about who pays, we’ll miss a much bigger problem hiding in plain sight.
The uncomfortable truth is that we’ve built a social care system that spends too much time deciding who doesn’t qualify for support.
Funding matters. There is no question that local authorities need greater resources to meet growing demand. But the solution to a social care system that works for everyone goes beyond funding alone.
At Access Social Care, we provide free legal advice to people trying to access the support they need to live independently and participate fully in their communities. What we see time and again is a system that creates barriers to care through rationing.
That isn’t because social workers or council staff don’t care – far from it. It is because financial pressures have shaped a culture where the priority often becomes managing demand rather than promoting wellbeing.
When budgets are stretched, the incentive is to restrict access, tighten eligibility and focus resources on those in the most acute need. Support that could prevent problems from escalating is delayed or denied because the system is under pressure to concentrate on immediate crises.
The result is a vicious cycle. A disabled person who could remain in work with the right support loses their independence. An older person struggles at home until a preventable fall lands them in hospital. An unpaid carer carries more and more responsibility until they reach breaking point themselves.
These outcomes are bad for individuals, bad for families and, ultimately, bad for public finances. Yet too often they are treated as inevitable.
What makes this particularly troubling is that it runs counter to the principles at the heart of the Care Act. The legislation is built around wellbeing. It recognises that social care should help people maintain dignity, independence, relationships and control over their own lives.
A system built around wellbeing cannot be judged by how effectively it keeps people out. Yet that is often what happens in practice. Cycles of review, reassessment and cuts can become exercises in reducing support rather than understanding what people need to live well.
This is why I welcome Andy Burnham’s intervention. Social care has too often been treated as an issue that can be postponed until another day. It is encouraging to hear a politician with leadership ambitions recognising it as one of the defining challenges of our time.
But real reform requires more than a new funding settlement. We need a deeper cultural shift away from rationing and towards prevention. Away from gatekeeping and towards enabling people to live the lives they want. Away from asking how many people we can keep out of the system and towards asking how many people we can help thrive.
Politicians are right to debate how social care should be funded. They should. But they also need to answer a more fundamental question: what is social care actually for? Because until we stop measuring success by how many people we can exclude, we’ll never build the system people deserve.
