Illustration: Elia Barbieri/The Guardian Illustration: Elia Barbieri/The Guardian Could this policy fix the care system and slash student debt at the same time?
Andy Burnham is in need of radical proposals.
A ‘care first’ year in exchange for 50% off fees could be just what he needs The UK’s social care sector is in crisis.
Costs are spiralling, with many local councils forced to dedicate the vast majority of their budgets to it.
At the same time, more and more families are seeing their savings disappear into the black hole of nursing home fees.
With an ageing population, the problem is set to get worse.
In only his second week as prime minister, Andy Burnham pledged to succeed where so many of his predecessors have failed: by fixing Britain’s social care system.
And yet, as parliament returns from recess, the new-ish administration is still worryingly unclear about how it will do this.
Despite Burnham declaring that care workers should enjoy better compensation, we don’t know how he plans to pay for any of it – not least because he has kept Starmer’s campaign pledge to not raise income tax, VAT or national insurance.
At the moment, it looks as though it will be impossible to square the circle.
What the government needs is big, innovative ideas.
We should look to history for inspiration, while also absorbing the lessons of past mistakes.
How about national service – but instead of entering the military, recruits are pledged to the NHS?
Eye-catching, but ultimately not right, at least not in that form.
Forcing young people to do work they’d prefer not to, when there isn’t even an enemy at the gates, will only lead to bad results.
Indeed, the army has already learned this: compulsory recruits in the postwar period were typically unmotivated and incompetent; a drag rather than a boost to the military’s performance.
But that’s a crude precedent.
We can take more relevant inspiration from elsewhere.
For example, young men in Austria who do not wish to serve in the military can instead opt for health or social care work; many end up driving ambulances.
The trade-off is that they do nine months instead of six.
In Norway, conscientious objectors were, until 2012, able to perform “civilian national service”, working in community settings such as primary schools or nursing homes, and accruing points towards university entry for doing so.
Thinking along similar lines, how about this?
The government offers recent school leavers a deal: 50% off their total university fees if they first spend a year volunteering in social care. (You could even up the ante: 100% off if they commit to two years; full back pay with a bonus if they stay in the profession.) There are many reasons to take this proposal seriously.
First, it is not just social care that is in crisis.
University funding is, too.
Right now, UK universities are panicking because student enrolment fees no longer keep them in the black.
But at the same time, undergraduates are being presented with eye-watering loan bills and interest rates at levels that make capital repayment much harder.
We are rapidly approaching a cliff edge.
The government is going to have to fix the system one way or the other.
Why not do something innovative and radical at the same time?
The overall maths might work surprisingly well.
If uptake is sufficiently high, the state gets an enormous amount of free (in the short term) labour to offset the costs of lost loan revenue.
If that sounds exploitative, remember that it would be in the interests of young people themselves (in the longer term) because they would leave university with a heck of a lot less debt.
But the upsides go beyond just money.
At the moment, unscrupulous agencies too often rely on low-paid migrant labour, ignoring the linguistic and caring skills required do a safe and competent job.
A scheme like this would open up a new pool for recruitment – of eager-to-learn young people at the start of their careers.
Of course, they would have to undergo proper training and would only get the discount if they complete the programme to a certified high level.
Along the way, some would discover that care work can be deeply rewarding; that the current stigmatisation of this kind of employment just doesn’t tally with reality.
I know, because since I broke my neck in a rock-climbing accident in 2023, I have relied on 24-hour live-in care.
I am lucky to be with a very good agency, which only employs highly competent and conscientious staff (from all over the world).
I have seen up close just how rewarding and dignified care work can be.
Sure, there are some icky parts to looking after a man who can’t go to the toilet by himself.
But all my care workers take real pride in helping me live as close to a normal life as possible.
Of course, they’re not on footballers’ wages.
But they get a very visible amount of life satisfaction from helping me find mine.
One of the most interesting care workers I’ve met was covering holiday earlier in the summer.
Originally from Ireland, she had just finished a two-year master’s degree at King’s College London (by coincidence where I teach, in a different department).
She is now a qualified dietitian, who in future will be working in hospitals.
But until she makes that transition she is spending a year with my spinal agency, after having been employed as a care worker in Ireland for two years prior to her degree.
It’s a job she finds deeply rewarding.
I am confident that if we incentivised UK students to try social care before university, many would consider rejoining once they had graduated.
This would help to reduce wider stigma around care work as the preserve of poor, often vulnerable migrant workers, assumed to be doing it only because no one else will. skip past newsletter promotion after newsletter promotion Look, I’m neither a government accountant nor a policy expert.
Perhaps when we’ve crunched the numbers, it just doesn’t work.
But from where I’m sitting this has the potential to be a win-win of the sort that could define the Burnham administration.
All the scheme needs is a name, and there’s an obvious one for the taking: “Care First”.
Dr Paul Sagar is a reader in political theory at King’s College London.
Further reading Labours of Love: The Crisis of Care by Madeleine Bunting (Granta, £9.99) The Courage to Care: Nurses, Families and Hope by Christie Watson (Vintage, £10.99) Who Cares by Emily Kenway (Headline, £12.99) Explore more on these topicsSociety The big idea Social care Welfare features Share Reuse this content
