Thanks to Heather for forwarding the ‘Viewpoint’ document Care and support – a community responsibility? from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in which David Brindle from the Guardian asserts that demographic and societal changes mean there will be a growing shortfall of family carers. Therefore it is imperative that care and support is reintegrated with, and owned by, the wider community.
He says:
Care and Support - a Community Responsibility
- Social care has become isolated from mainstream society and its recipients are cut off from their neighbourhoods and from each other;
- The voice of service users must be amplified and heard;
- Consideration needs to be given to a new form of social contract, offering incentives to deliver care and support whilst making explicit the relative responsibilities of the state, family and community.
David Brindle argues that the delivery of social care has become isolated from society and that ‘in the longer term, however, the roles and functions that we have come to call social care must be re-embraced by society as a whole’.
He also sounds a cautious note about the focus of Individual Budgets at the heart of the personalisation agenda, he quotes Sophie Moulin who says in the IPPR report Just Care? (2008)
- “By only considering the relationship of individual users with services (for example, through individual control over service budgets) we risk achieving independence at the expense of inclusion, focusing on consumer relations to the neglect of caring relationships. In practice, equal access to opportunities for those needing and giving care depends upon collective as well as individual participation in services.”
So how is social capital to be developed?
David Brindle suggests that approaches like ‘Time-banking’ and ‘Care Share’ schemes are very useful, however he feels that there needs to be something more and this he suggests this ‘would be a comprehensive agreement of rights and responsibilities across the social spectrum – including, critically, neighbourhoods and communities’. This social contract would be underpinned by a fundamental re-evaluation of the value of care within our society, and through this the balance of responsibility for care between individuals, communities, and government becomes far more explicit.
