Sustainable Care Seminar Series: videos

Who cares? Financialisation in social care. 

Finance has permeated every layer of our economy and society. Testament to this is the growing control of big finance over social care. In the last few decades private provision of social care – in particular residential care – has become the norm, with large scale borrowing used by companies to buy up care homes across the county. But the evidence is increasingly clear that these business models, driven as they are by financialisation, are neither sustainable nor desirable. How did this happen? Why is it a problem? And, what do we do about it? These are the questions asked by IPPR’s recent research on the future of social care.

Harry Quilter-Pinner

Harry is a Senior Research Fellow in the Work and the Welfare State team.

He heads up IPPR’s flagship Better Health and Care programme which looks to shape policy in the UK on the NHS, social care and public health. He was a lead author on the independent cross-party Lord Darzi Review which shaped the NHS Long-Term Plan and recent NHS funding settlement. He has also led the organisations work on austerity and public spending, and contributed to research on education, welfare and environmental policy.

Harry writes regularly for the Guardian, Times, Independent and New Statesman, and has appeared on radio and tv, including Sky and BBC news.

In addition to his role at IPPR, Harry also works for LGBT Consortium, the UK’s LGBT+ sector body. He was previously Director of Strategy at SCT, a homelessness and addictions charity and has worked at Global Counsel, a consultancy firm, and at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO).

He has a degree in economics from the University of York.

Carers and the failure of ‘identity’

The seminar celebrates the 55th anniversary of the founding of the carers movement; the 25th anniversary of the enactment of the first ‘carers’ recognition’ statute and 10th anniversary of the landmark European Court of Justice ruling in Coleman v. Attridge Law.

It considers the effectiveness of ‘carer recognition’ legislation, enacted in many jurisdictions over the last four decades – and questions the potential of such laws to radically address the profound disadvantage that many carers experience.

In his seminar Luke Clements suggests that identify based approaches, aimed at protecting the rights of unpaid carer and of taking them to a ‘socially just’ destination have not delivered and are unlikely to.

Luke Clements is the Cerebra Professor of Law & Social Justice at the School of Law, Leeds University.

Luke was involved in the drafting of the Westminster Bill’s that became the Carers (Recognition and Services) Act 1995 and the Carers (Equal Opportunities) Act 2004, as well as acting as the expert adviser to the Joint Parliamentary Select Committee scrutinising the Care & Support Bill 2013.

He has written widely including a comparative analysis of global carer rights laws – L Clements ‘Does your carer take sugar?’ in the Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice (2013) Volume 19 pp 397 -434.

A brief biographical note is at https://essl.leeds.ac.uk/law/staff/184/professor-luke-clements  

A sustainable care sector depends not only on sufficient funding, but also on the ways in which finance is sourced and used by providers. This research identifies changing uses of debt and real estate assets among large care home companies. It explores the implications for care workers, the built environment of care homes, and the stability of the sector. Findings are based on analysis of corporate reports and interviews with investors, carers and managers. Theoretically, the study is informed by care ethics and critiques of financialisation. Overall, I argue that certain financial strategies have made the sector more fragile, and a different approach is needed to ensure universal access to good care and decent employment in the sector.

Amy Horton joined UCL as a lecturer in economic geography at UCL in 2017, after completing a PhD at Queen Mary University of London. Her research examines the intersections of finance, care and labour. In particular, she investigates the financing of care homes and strategies for organising by care workers and wider movements, in both the UK and US. Previously, Amy worked as a policy researcher and campaigner in NGOs focusing on the international financial institutions, financial regulation and human rights.