Adult Social Care Funding Reform – from The Care Alliance Association

A proposal for a sustainable, equitable and nationally consistent funding framework for adult social care in England

caa-adult-social-care-funding-reform-2026

Please take the time to read this thought provoking & well constructed report and give us your thoughts.

Foreword
I came to social care after a very interesting career. Having qualified as a Chartered Accountant, I worked for
long-established family businesses supporting their acquisitions in manufacturing, and then in Silicon Valley.
This experience is what enables me to look at the social care sector in the way that I do and join policy
discussions to the reality on the ground.
Having worked in social care for more than twenty years, I am struck by how rarely this country thinks about it
until the moment it can no longer avoid doing so. When someone can no longer manage at home. When a family
is suddenly confronted with decisions they were not prepared to make. When the questions that have always felt
distant become urgent: who will provide the care, who will pay for it, and what will it mean for the people we
love?
For those who have already faced those questions, and for the providers who deliver care within the system
every day, the answers have too often depended on things that should not matter. Where you live. What your
local authority can afford. Whether there happens to be a provider willing to operate at the rates on offer.
That is not a system. It is an accumulation of pressures and compromises, arranged in a way that passes the cost
to those least able to bear it.
I have spent the better part of my career in and around social care. The problem has never been a lack of
dedicated people. The care workforce is one of the most committed in the country. The problem is structural.
The system was not designed for the demographic reality it now faces, and no amount of dedication at the
frontline can substitute for a funding model that is fit for purpose. That is why the Care Association Alliance has
decided to step up. This paper is the first in a programme of reform that we will publish over the coming months.
We have not done this lightly. It represents a deliberate decision that the sector cannot wait for others to make
the case on its behalf.
The Casey Commission represents a genuine opportunity to settle what a reformed funding model should look
like. The proposals in this paper are detailed and evidence-based, but they rest on a principle that is
straightforward. The financial risk of growing old and needing care is a national risk, and it should be managed
nationally, not through a free service, the absorption of social care into the NHS, or at the expense of the local
relationships and provider diversity on which good care depends, but through a national funding settlement that
gives individuals certainty, providers stability, and local authorities the resources to do the job they are asked to
do.
The Care Association Alliance does not publish this paper and move on. We publish it as the opening of a
sustained programme of work, and as a commitment to our members, to the workforce, and to the people they
care for that we will continue to make this case for as long as it needs to be made. The Casey Commission will
not be short of voices. We intend to be one that speaks from direct experience of what the system actually
requires.

Melanie Weatherley MBE
Co-Chair, Care Association Alliance