Social care inequalities in England: evidence briefing

Nic Brimblecombe and Tania Burchardt

Published 8 September 2021

Adult social care in England is once again high on the political agenda. The government has announced the introduction of a lifetime cap on eligible care costs and a slightly less harsh means-test for publicly-funded care. These are important developments which bear on the inequity of the costs faced by people with modest (or greater) wealth who are unlucky enough to develop a condition with substantial long-term care requirements, such as dementia. But funding reform of this kind largely ignores major underlying inequalities: in care need and unmet need, in the receipt and experience of care, and in the burden of unpaid caring.

This briefing focuses on these inequalities in adult social care. It arises from a workshop held with policymakers and practitioners on 'Joining up, avoiding silos: social policy and services organised around the person'. Both the workshop and this briefing form part of the Nuffield Foundation funded research programme, Social Policies and Distributional Outcomes in a Changing Britain (SPDO), which examines social policies and social inequalities between the General Election in May 2015 and early 2020, the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic.