The Prime Minister has established social care as a key government priority. It is encouraging to hear a Prime Minister acknowledge the importance of reform, describing previous failure to reform as “a major dereliction of public duty”, calling for “more problem solving, less point scoring”, cross-party collaboration, and a focus on building a system that is person-centred.
Lasting reform depends not only on policy but also on culture, requiring both political and public buy-in. That means building greater public understanding of what social care is, as well as why it matters. If social care is to change, it needs a shared commitment between government, local systems, providers, communities and, most importantly, people with lived experience. That commitment must also recognise that people’s experiences are shaped by inequality, and ensure that racialised communities, disabled people from minoritised backgrounds and other structurally excluded groups are part of shaping reform.
TLAP hopes that the Prime Minister can achieve his goal of putting “the care of people at the heart” by making social care truly person-centred, listening to the voice of lived experience, and giving people the choice and control to live the lives they want.
Turning ambition into reality
The challenge now is ensuring that people experience these ambitions in their everyday lives.
That is where Making It Real has such an important role to play.
Making It Real was co-produced by people who draw on care and support alongside people who work across social care, including commissioners, providers and the voluntary sector. Its continued strength depends on ensuring that the full diversity of lived experience is heard, including people whose experiences of care are shaped by structural inequality. Rather than describing services, it describes what good lives look like through a set of “I” and “We” statements organised across six themes. It provides a practical compass for organisations wanting to improve care and support by starting with people’s experiences rather than organisational processes.
Importantly, Making It Real begins with what matters to people, uses co-production to design improvement, and helps organisations translate policy aspirations into meaningful everyday practice. It helps define the change we are working towards and offers a shared lens through which improvement, reform and accountability can be understood.
That feels particularly relevant at a time when the Prime Minister has committed to building a National Care Service that is both person-centred and focused on wellbeing, creating the conditions for people to live well.
If those ambitions are to become more than policy statements, they must be grounded in the lived experience of people drawing on care and support. Making It Real offers an established, co-produced way of doing exactly that.
Choice and control must be central
The Government’s emphasis on independence and choice is equally welcome. Yet we know from experience that stating these principles is only the beginning.
The Social Care Institute for Excellence’s (SCIE’s) latest research, ‘How care inequities shape social care experiences’, shows that personalisation too often happens despite systems rather than because of them; access to good care is strongly shaped not only by financial means and geography, but also by race, language, cultural understanding and a person’s ability to understand and navigate the system.
This should not be the case. Choice and control must be reflected in assessments, support planning, commissioning, information and advice, workforce development and day-to-day practice, including culturally competent support and language access.
This is why TLAP continues to champion approaches such as Direct Payments and Individual Service Funds. They represent practical ways of enabling people to shape support around their lives, rather than fitting their lives around services.
Commissioning that starts with people’s lives
The Government’s ambition for a person-centred system focused on wellbeing will only be realised if commissioning supports those same outcomes. How local authorities commission care shapes the support that people ultimately experience.
For TLAP, this means moving beyond commissioning services towards commissioning for the outcomes that matter to people. Asset-based commissioning starts with people’s strengths, relationships and aspirations, recognising the role of communities alongside formal care. It asks not simply ‘what service is needed?’, but ‘what support will enable this person to live the life they want?’
This also needs to be values-led. At an individual level, commissioning should start with what we are trying to enable a person to achieve; at a strategic level, it should create the conditions for people to live good lives, with the right support at the right time.
An asset-based approach must, however, recognise that assets are not equally distributed. It should build on the strengths that exist while also investing in what is missing, particularly in communities affected by historic underinvestment, rather than becoming a reason to withdraw funded support.
The Social Care Future ‘Early action’ Community of Support is demonstrating how this approach can help prevent needs from escalating by building on local assets, supporting community connections and co-producing support that works for people, rather than expecting people to fit around services. But this also requires recognition that access to local assets is unequal, and that early action needs investment alongside co-production.
This principle also underpins TLAP’s Developing an Individual Service Fund offer, which argues that genuine choice and control depend on commissioning that enables flexible, person-centred support focused on people’s individual outcomes.
An opportunity we should not miss
There is much to welcome from the Prime Minister’s first weeks in office: the recognition that social care is fundamental to the future of the NHS; the focus on wellbeing; the emphasis on person-centred care; and the willingness to seek cross-party consensus. These all represent an opportunity to progress the conversation on improving lives.
The Prime Minister said he wanted to “put the care of people at the heart of everything I do” and called this moment “a circuit breaker for Britain.” The opportunity now is to turn that ambition into practical change: using Making It Real to keep reform grounded in people’s lives, and using the political capital of this moment to make that change happen. Crucially, progress should also be judged by whether reform is closing inequalities in people’s experiences and outcomes, including by looking at differences by ethnicity, disability and deprivation.
