The story of social care has too often been written by politicians, headlines and crises rather than by the people who live and deliver it. David Huckerby, founder of specialist health and social care communications agency Conteur, explores why reclaiming the narrative could be just as important as reforming the system itself.
Something not many people know about me is that I essentially grew up in a care home. My parents owned and ran one, so my childhood came with a house full of extended grandparents, with time, opinions, mischief and decades of stories worth telling. Long before I heard the words “crisis”, “funding gap” or “workforce shortages”, the story I knew about care was one of human connection and family.
I have spent the rest of my life watching that story evolve. Through my years as a registered manager in home care, leading learning disability services, and now almost two decades in creative communications at Conteur, one question has never left me: who actually controls the story of social care?
With the launch of the Big Conversation on Care and renewed political focus on reform, social care is finally being placed at the centre of the national conversation. But as the country debates what it should become, we must also consider who has shaped the public’s understanding of it until now.
Earlier this year, Baroness Casey observed that, unlike the NHS, social care has never had a “creation moment”: no point at which the nation collectively decided what it was for, who it served or what people should expect from it.
When you have no founding story of your own, others will write one for you.
For decades, politicians have framed social care as a cost to be constrained: a pressure on the Treasury, a strain on the NHS and a reform problem kicked into the next parliament. The media has told a story of crisis because scandal and collapse make easy headlines. Regulators evaluate care through a vocabulary of ratings, enforcement and failure.
Each narrative contains part of the truth. Together, they have too often become the whole story. The sector’s response has been largely reactive: rebutting headlines, responding to inspections or lobbying around budgets.
Here is the uncomfortable part. Crisis is not only a story about social care. It is one we have learned to tell ourselves.
Nearly every funding submission, campaign and roundtable leads with collapse because it seems most likely to unlock political attention. But somewhere along the way, crisis stopped being our situation and became our brand.
If we reduce social care to an underfunded, overworked sector in perpetual meltdown, why would an ambitious young person choose it as a career? People do not join care merely to become overworked heroes. They join to make a difference.
When those already working in care rarely see their expertise reflected in the public story, it reinforces the sense that their contribution is misunderstood or invisible. Constantly portraying the workforce as exhausted and at breaking point may highlight genuine pressures, but it does little to show why people should build a long-term career in the sector.
Public trust is shaped in similar ways. If the only stories people hear are about failure and crisis, care can appear permanently unsafe or unstable. But polished “good news” is not the answer either. Families know care is complex. Trust is built through honest stories that recognise the pressures while revealing the skill, relationships and judgement that make good care possible.
As long as care is viewed as a leaky bucket rather than essential social infrastructure that enables people to live full lives, funding will be treated as a concession rather than an investment. Funding follows values, and values are shaped by the stories people hear.
Taking back the pen
The Casey Commission has identified 22 major reviews, papers and commissions on social care since 1997, yet lasting reform has remained elusive. Arguments about funding have too often taken place without first building a shared understanding of what social care is, what it provides and why it matters.
The twenty-third has started with a question instead. The Big Conversation on Care is asking people across England what care should be, who it should support and what we should all contribute in return. For the first time, the pen has not been handed solely to politicians, the media or even the sector. It has been handed to the public.
This is not the moment for a glossy campaign. What we have is the truth, and it is far more compelling than anything we could manufacture.
It is the psychological skill involved in de-escalating distress for someone living with dementia. It is the quiet triumph of a person with a learning disability moving into their own home. It is also the planning, professional judgement, trust and consistency behind those outcomes.
Too much care communication stops at the visible activity. A photograph of a gardening session or community visit may capture a positive moment, but the more powerful story is what that moment enabled: renewed confidence, greater independence, connection with others or the return of a memory and identity someone feared they had lost.
Organisations should give their workforce space to speak about their expertise, not only their exhaustion. And that story cannot simply be told about people. It has to be told with them.
People drawing on care should have the platform and authority to speak on their own terms. They should understand how their experiences will be used, have a meaningful say in how their story is presented and retain the right to change their minds. Lived experience should never become an emotional prop in somebody else’s campaign.
Social care cannot control every headline, political argument or public judgement. It can, however, take greater responsibility for the language it repeats and the picture it contributes.
Hand the public crisis alone and we already know where the story leads. Hand them the fuller truth, told with the people who live and deliver care, and social care might finally get the creation moment it has never had.
