Introduction

While our focus is ‘person-centred support’, this is also very much a book about making change. It is concerned with changing the way that people who need support to live their lives, are able to get that support. It addresses the current concern of governments to achieve this. It examines efforts that many people and services are making to work in a different ‘person-centred’ way to achieve this. The book also explores how people can be helped to work better in this way.

There has been enormous interest in making change in social care in the UK. Words like ‘transformation’, ‘revolutionary’ and ‘fundamental’ change have been used by government, as well as by other policymakers and commentators to signify this. The reform of social care funding emerged as a high profile issue in advance of the 2010 General Election, with competing proposals advanced by the major political parties. The two parties, Conservative and Liberal Democrat, that made up the subsequent coalition government, previously had very different, strongly conflicting approaches to social care. Earlier, the former Labour government had invested more than half a billion pounds, an unprecedented amount, in social care change and set up planning bodies to take it forward, as well as organising large-scale consultations, at national and local levels. The Coalition government then followed a similar path, committing itself to fundamental reform of both social care legislation and funding.

Yet change has been a consistent, almost dominant feature of social care for many years – almost since its inception as part of the post Second World War welfare state.