Non, je ne regrette rien?

Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once said that life can only be understood by looking backward; but it must be lived looking forward, an aphorism that is highly germane to understanding past efforts to tackle social care reform. There is no shortage of former ministers, prime ministers, even, who appear to undergo a Damascene conversion about the importance of social care reform once they have left office. David Cameron, prime minister between 2010 and 2016, has written movingly of his family’s first-hand experience of the good that social care can do, recounting the support he received with his severely disabled son, Ivan, including carers organised by the council: ‘I found the phone number of Kensington and Chelsea council’s social workers and soon, to my great relief, one of them was sitting in our kitchen, notepad in hand, talking about the help that was available’ (Cameron, 2019). Years later, he was to describe his government’s failure to deliver social care reform as ‘one of my greatest regrets.’ There is no mention of social care in Tony Blair’s account of his ten years in Downing Street, nor in his successor’s, who seemed more exercised by how to integrate social care with the NHS (Brown, 2017). Norman Lamont, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1990s, interviewed by historian Peter Hennessy in his Radio 4 series Reflections, was asked, if he could be granted one last reform, what it would be. “Care of the elderly,” he replied, describing it as “the great unresolved issue of public policy” (BBC, 2019). More recently, Jeremy Hunt, the longest serving Secretary of State for health and social care, has said that one of his biggest regrets about his time in that role was that social care was not better protected from austerity. ‘It was the silent cut that people didn’t notice until too late’, he said (Sodha, 2021). ‘Our social care problem is now critical … so why the delay in fixing it?’ he asked in another newspaper article, admitting that having secured a substantial ten-year funding settlement for the NHS, he failed to do the same for social care.