This book examines a familiar and contemporary social policy issuethe crisis besetting social carebut differs from usual accounts by including additional perspectives (philosophical, ethical and political) not often raised but nonetheless crucial to understanding the issue. Its central argument is that while a health/care divide dates back to legislative separation at the inception of the welfare state in the 1940s, the major cause of the current crisis has been the slow but insidious ideological and practical splitting off and fracturing of social care from other state welfare institutions, notably the NHS, and its consequent entrapment in the treacherous straits of profit and loss, self-interest and individualism. These issues and others, the book argues, contribute to the building of a strong case for bringing social care into the public sector. Towards the end, the book goes on to consider the impact, from 2020, of the Covid 19 pandemic on a caring crisis that was already well-established.  The consequences of this global shock are still working through and are likely to be profound. Solutions, as the book describes, which were already being formulated prior to the arrival of the pandemic, are even more salient now. The book will therefore be of interest to students and researchers of social policy and public policy, health and social care professionals and policymakers and users of social care themselves.

Gillian Dalley is a social anthropologist and has been an independent researcher for more than a decade, completing most recently a project on the financial abuse of people lacking mental capacity, for Brunel University London, funded by the Dawes Trust. She is the author of Ideologies of Caring: Rethinking community and collectivism, and, in a long career, has worked for several London-based organisations including the Kings Fund, the Policy Studies Institute and the Centre for Policy on Ageing, as well as working as a senior NHS quality manager, and as a researcher at the former MRC Medical Sociology Unit in Aberdeen in the early 1980s.

Chapter 1.Social care: how did it come to this?.- Chapter 2.Ethics and ideologies of caring.- Chapter 3.The advent of the welfare state: institutions, professionals and activists.- Chapter 4.Health and social care: the purchaser/provider split.- Chapter 5.Opening the window on social care: contracts and quality control.- Chapter 6.An alternative view: public services in public hands.- Chapter 7.Catastrophe: the impact of Covid 19 and the consequences for social care.- Chapter 8.Social care: principle, policy and practice now and to come.