A word from our CEO, Charlotte Newman, on why we welcome social care reform, but unpaid carers can't afford to wait.
The debate about social care is finally finding a much-needed public policy forum. Baroness Casey’s Big Conversation on Care is asking the public for input on questions that successive governments have postponed for decades: what should care look like, who should be entitled to it, and how should we pay for it? At the same time, Prime Minister Andy Burnham has put social care reform firmly back on the political agenda, with a commitment to address the workforce crisis and build towards a National Care Service.
At Carefree, we welcome these initiatives.
Our social care system is broken. The people who depend on it, the people who work within it, and the millions of unpaid carers who prop it up every day all know this. Baroness Casey is right that we need an honest conversation about what we want from care, and the Prime Minister is right that we need the political will to finally build an integrated social care system.
But there is one thing I want to make clear: carers cannot wait for the end point of this process. A National Care Service may be years away. Building consensus, designing a new system, and legislating and implementing it will take time. That work matters hugely and should be done conscientiously and thoroughly, but it cannot become a reason to postpone action for the people providing care today.
For an unpaid carer, “reform is coming” does not create an hour of respite or alone time. It does not mean they can sleep through the night, meet a friend for a long lunch or simply take a breather from providing care for someone else for a little while.
A short break offers opportunities for precisely those restorative activities. At Carefree, alongside our hospitality and community partners, we have built the platform and infrastructure to facilitate such breaks for unpaid carers.
We have also, in collaboration with Just Economics, done the research that is too often missing from debates about social care. That research shows that the practical intervention we designed makes a measurable difference. Each Carefree break generates £2,617 in social value and saves the public purse £294. More than three-quarters of carers say their break contributed to preventing a crisis breakdown. We have also created an Impact Calculator so you can see the difference Carefree's offering could make at scale. Our calculator allows policymakers, funders and partners to model the potential social value and public savings generated by providing carer breaks.
The evidence is clear, and so is the proof of concept. This is not a theoretical policy proposal. It is something we are doing now, with real carers, real communities and real partners. That matters because debates about social care can become so focused on the architecture of the future system that we lose sight of the people holding the system together today. Unpaid carers are not peripheral to social care: they are integral to its infrastructure.
If we are serious about building a system that values people, prevention and independence, then supporting unpaid carers has to be part of that system from the beginning – not something we append afterwards. That means putting a meaningful right to a break at the heart of the reforms now being discussed. We should not have to choose between ambitious structural reform in the future and practical action today. Both are necessary.
The Big Conversation on Care gives us an opportunity to say what kind of care system we want. The answer, for me, is one that recognises caring as a human relationship, not an inexhaustible resource. It is a system that supports people to continue caring without sacrificing their own health, relationships and lives in the process.
With the Prime Minister’s commitment, we have an opportunity to build that system. But we should not confuse the scale of the task ahead with a need to wait before acting. We do not need to redesign the entire social care system before we can support unpaid carers better.
Short breaks are a clear example. We know there is demand. We know breaks make a difference. We know there is an economic case. And we know there are innovative ways of making breaks available at scale.
Carefree has spent the past decade proving that it is possible to turn an underused resource – unsold hotel accommodation – into meaningful time away for unpaid carers. The infrastructure exists, the model works, and it can be scaled now.
That is why carer breaks should be part of the action we take while wider social care reform is being developed. There is a danger, whenever we embark on a major review of a broken system, that the review itself becomes the action. We cannot allow that to happen here. Unpaid carers have already waited long enough.
The opportunity now is to do two things at once: have the difficult, long-term conversation about what social care in this country should become, while investing in interventions that can make carers’ lives better today. For policymakers, funders and organisations working alongside unpaid carers, the question is no longer whether we understand the problem. We do. The question is whether we are prepared to act on what we already know.
At Carefree, we know that carer breaks are part of the answer – not someday, when a new social care system is finally in place, but now. The reform of social care may take years. Supporting the people who sustain it should not.
