We’re only human… 

In a week where Andy Burnham has declared he’s willing to spend his political capital on addressing social care, our strategy director Phillipa Williams, talks about what we’ve learnt about having a real conversation about care and her hopes for, if handled well, the potential of wider social change.  

During our focus groups on unpaid care and system reform in 2025, one of the biggest things that struck us was how reluctant the members of our groups were when talking about what the role that they expected to assume.   

Apathy? Nope. We were talking to people who all expected to provide care in the near term. 

Bigger issues on their minds?  Not really.  

Mainly, they were scared.   

For them the idea of talking about, planning for, discussing the issue was inextricably entangled in their minds with the reason why they would be doing it – an accident, illness, loss.     

And when they thought about what caring was going to be like – they saw it as lonely, isolating and unequivocally negative.  

Combined together – it makes it really challenging to have a conversation about reform or investment.  And it makes it very easy to perpetuate these fears by shouting at people about how awful and bad it is, as a way of creating a burning platform.  

So how do Louise Casey and Andy Burnham need to approach this conversation with the public about what they want and need ?  

Two things:  

Acknowledge that this is hard to talk about – nobody wants to imagine that we will need care or provide care. That requires gentle, deft political handling.  As I listened to Andy Burnham talking about his dad on the This Morning sofa, I felt that he started to do that, by showing that he finds it hard too.  

And then show what’s possible – our research participants could not name one thing that they thought could make providing care for someone anything other than lonely, isolating and hard.  I think that this is reflective of both the ‘sacrifice’ and crises that have been embedded in how we have perceived unpaid care and how ableism is still a strong dominant narrative in our society.  But it is also reflective of the complexity of the system, how impenetrable it can be and that we often come face to face with it for the first time in moments of crises, when our cognitive bandwidth is low and our sense of guilt and fear are high. So people don’t really know what we are talking about when we talk about the role of the state in providing and supporting care – what are they entitled to, how does it show up, do they want it?   

But, when we started talking about examples of what good, supported care looks like – what it can do for the person providing care and the person receiving it, we started to see a shift.  Slowly, they were able to see an alternative.  

I want us to move beyond ‘choices’ and ‘trade offs’ and ‘funding models’ – and start with the reality of what it is to be human, to acknowledge our fears and dreams for ourselves and for those who support us.  And gently help each other to lift our heads out of the sand and move us to place where we can see what social care can and could be.  Not complex models of funding but tangible examples, told and shaped by the people who experience and provide care, in all its forms.  

And then maybe this could be more than a policy exercise.  It could be a catalyst to create new societal and cultural norms, that encourage us all to think and talk about what is important to us if, and when, our health changes.  What are the expectations of ourselves, of those around us and the state? And what needs to change, in our homes, in our families, our workplaces, our communities and our institutions to make that a reality?    

Now that gives me hope, Andy.  

You can read more about the research that underpins these views here.