11 - Maximizing Options and Opportunities

Summary

The English Care Act recognizes the possibility that carers may be both unpaid carers and paid workers. It also recognizes both care and support users and carers as potential rights-holders on the basis of their needs and/or responsibilities and partly contemplates that people may be in both roles at the same time. While its gaps and limitations mean many people cannot access rights-based support, these policy features do offer a scaffolding for developing a policy that aligns with the six principles proposed in this book. This chapter sketches the reforms that would be necessary to overcome the limitations of the policy in terms of its inadequate support for unpaid care and paid work, lack of recognition of the gender division of labor and inadequate responses to the claims of carers and people with disabilities. These include removing the ‘hard’ eligibility threshold and introducing greater flexibility and user control in assessment and eligibility determinations; ensuring that budgets are sufficient to ensure decent pay and conditions for paid workers; and revising the definition of ‘well-being’ to ensure that the policy captures human rights considerations and all of the matters care and support users and carers consider to be important.