Alexandra Davis, Director of Marketing and Communications at Pilgrims’ Friend Society, explores lack of conversation about social care during the election and considers what we can do about it

After all the drama of a surprising summer election, life is beginning to settle down under the new Labour government. We’ve got used to having a new Prime Minister in Sir Keir Starmer, we’ve familiarised ourselves with the names of the new Cabinet, and perhaps we’ve signed up to receive newsletters or followed the social media profiles of our newly (re-)elected MPs. It’s back to business in the world of governing.

As you probably know, at Pilgrims’ Friend Society we’re very concerned with the issue of social care, so we were disappointed that there was almost little mention of it in the election campaign. Even more disappointingly, there was no significant mention of it during the first days of the new government as the Labour Party began to announce some early decisions, measures, and initiatives. This is frustrating - surely as one of the defining challenges of the current age, social care deserves a proper place in our national political conversation?

In my mind, the near silence on the subject means one of two things: the new government has no better idea about how to solve the crisis in social care than any of its predecessors, or it has a big plan which it expects to announce in due course. In all honesty, I suspect it’s the former. And I feel a degree of sympathy for them given how intractable and impossible it seems to be to find a solution that’s affordable and palatable. However, it’s also deeply frustrating that a problem that’s been staring us in the face for decades seems to have been, once again, avoided.

What we do know about the new government – and what they told us on repeat during the election campaign – is that there is a steely-eyed focus on delivering economic growth. We know that increased public spending is not going to be easy to come by and that means we know that it is very unlikely that there will be a significant funding package for the social care system in the near future.

So, we can write off just pumping funds into the system, which means we need to be bracing ourselves for its reform instead. Reform of the social care sector is not a new concept, and almost all of us involved in it are supportive of the idea of change, if it ensures that vulnerable people get the care and support that they need when they need it, and that those providing those services can be paid fairly for the work that they do. We know at the moment that there are wonderful people working incredibly hard to achieve all of those things but struggling under the weight and complexities of a system that no government wants to own or take responsibility for.

At Pilgrims’ Friend Society, part of the reform that we’d like to see is about how we think about social care, rather than just about how the sector is funded. Our document, Empowering Communities to Care, which we shared with supporters, partners, and friends earlier this year, outlines a different way of thinking about social care: we put communities at the heart of the social care system because we can see that this is where so much work is already being done.