Introduction

The discussion in the previous chapters has pointed to persistent trends in policies on unpaid care over three decades and in practices at the local level. Policies have secured gains for carers but evidently have not delivered what they promised and this chapter examines the gaps between the rhetoric and the reality. Such gaps are frequently characterised as a fault in policy implementation, with explanations focused on the inadequacy of resources or on bureaucratic blockages, which spoil what was originally a ‘good’ policy on paper. In this discussion, however, implementation is not conceptualised as a separate sphere of activity from policy making. The different perspectives that are brought to bear on how change can and should be brought about to better support unpaid care reflect a complex process of problem identification, negotiation, bargaining and compromise and key aspects of this process are the framing of issues to be included in policies and differences in power between interest groups involved. From this perspective, the inadequacy of resources is a determining factor not only in relation to the implementation of a policy but also in its conceptualisation. A key question raised at the beginning of this book was why resources for unpaid care have been so consistently inadequate. A related question raised was why the same demands for better recognition and support have recurred since the 1990s. These questions point to fundamental problems arising from the social and cultural values underpinning policies and the role and purpose of policy making. The distribution of responsibilities between government and individuals when it comes to providing care and support when people need it remains highly contested.

As discussed in Chapter 3, policies on unpaid carers are often ambiguous or opaque, as for example in the definition of a carer in the 1995 Carers (Recognition and Services) Act as one whose role is substantial and regular ‘in the everyday sense’. As argued, such ambiguities give rise to diverse practices, ‘postcode lotteries’ and inequalities between carers which raise questions about the value of policies. There are tensions, also, including a wider, overarching issue discussed by Rummery and Fine (2012), which involves the incompatibility of political aims to meet demands for social justice for unpaid carers on the one hand and ideological commitment to reduce state activities in welfare on the other.