The Care Association Alliance (CAA) has launched a new programme of policy papers to put the voice of frontline care providers at the centre of the national debate on adult social care reform, as the sector warns that waiting until 2028 for the Casey Commission’s final recommendations risks leaving reform too late.
The programme, titled Building a National Care Service: A Programme for Reform, will see the CAA publish a series of papers over the coming weeks and months, each addressing a distinct structural challenge facing the sector. The first paper will make the case for a nationally coherent funding framework, arguing that without a sustainable funding settlement at its foundation, wider reform will remain out of reach. Subsequent papers will address commissioning, workforce, service delivery and the relationship between health and social care.
The programme builds on Co-Chair of the CAA Melanie Weatherley MBE’s recent writing on the state of social care, in which she argued that more than 80 years after Beveridge, Want and Disease still loom large in the sector and that the moment to act is now.
Contributing to the Casey Commission
The CAA’s programme is explicitly designed to contribute to the work of the Independent Commission on Adult Social Care, chaired by Baroness Casey. The Commission is currently in the midst of its first phase, with cross-party discussions underway and its initial report expected in 2026. However, final recommendations are not due until 2028, a timetable that makes significant legislative reform unlikely before the next general election.
With the Commission’s evidence-gathering phase now open, the CAA believes the window to shape its thinking is critical, and that the voice of frontline providers must be central to the recommendations that emerge. The reform papers will be submitted to the Commission.
A system under pressure
The first paper in the CAA’s programme will focus on funding and make the case that the current model is neither equitable nor sustainable. Today, the financial burden of a national demographic challenge falls largely on local authorities whose budgets vary enormously from one part of the country to the next. The result is a system where access to care is shaped by geography as much as by need, where providers operate on rates that do not cover their costs, and where individuals and families face costs that are unpredictable and bear little relationship to what others elsewhere pay for equivalent support.
The paper sets out a new model for how care should be funded, one designed to reduce these inequities and put the system on a sustainable footing.
Melanie Weatherley MBE, Co-Chair of the Care Association Alliance, said:
“The Casey Commission represents a genuine opportunity to build the cross-party consensus that social care reform has long needed, and we strongly welcome its work. But the sector cannot afford to stand back and wait until 2028 for answers. The people we support cannot wait, and the pressures our members are working under cannot wait either.
“At the Care Association Alliance, we work with providers on the frontline of care every day, and it is from that vantage point that we have been developing a programme of reform. Over the coming months we will set out, paper by paper, what a genuine National Care Service should look like in practice, starting with the case for a nationally coherent funding framework and extending to commissioning, workforce and the relationship between health and care.”
