Care Starts with Community
A sector that refuses to be quiet
As the year draws to a close, it feels like a good time to reflect…
This year, I have been so inspired by our wonderful social care sector – the sector that seems to have been forgotten but is by no means silenced.
A sector that is taking the challenge of caring for an increasing number of our most vulnerable upon itself; a sector that sees and knows the solutions, is happy to share how its doing it and is driving change from within.
A lot has been mentioned this year about the lack of national direction, the long wait for the Casey Commission reforms and the regular policy changes that are directly and incrementally making supporting our most vulnerable tougher and tougher. I’ve been a part of countless conversations about how the 10 Year Health Plan (for England) links to social care – whether it even does and how this should look?
Why the shift to community matters
The shift to community and to prevention in the Government’s 10 Year Health Plan is one I welcome wholeheartedly. Neighbourhood teams, even better, neighbourhood centres being at the core is a good move; it recognises that health and wellbeing are not built in hospitals, but in the places where people live, work, and connect.
Behind these plans is surely that sense of community, with services central to the neighbourhoods that surround them.It is that community that I believe now needs to enable and drive social care reform.
Prevention: lessons we chose not to keep
Whilst it is unclear which social care professionals will be based in Neighbourhood Health Teams, the linkage between health and social care is clear. If we are preventive, if we work across teams to reduce risk factors, if we are able to monitor for signs of risk and intervene at an earlier stage, we can reduce the level of crisis.
History teaches us the importance of prevention. Looking back at our services pre-austerity, our early help services served as both a point of access to services and support, and a driver of prevention that reduced the need for crisis interventions; being both far more costly, and most importantly, avoidable traumas in people’s lives. Early intervention and prevention now accounts for only 1% of adult social care spend.
Equitable access to services such as Sure Start Centres, day services, Falls Prevention Programmes, Early Dementia Support and even local community services, such as youth groups, libraries, post offices – so many of these vital community anchors have disappeared. They were the places people met, where you were known and noticed, where relationships were built. They created the kind of connectedness where, if you didn’t see someone one week, you’d ask around or pop by to check they were okay. Small acts of noticing and caring that often prevented bigger problems down the line.
The aim of austerity was to ignore those early signs of need to reduce immediate demand – and it worked. It pushed the need further up the chain until it was a crisis. Now we’ve run out of road.
Learning how to notice one another
When society spends years ignoring instincts, silencing that hunch that “something isn’t right,” we lose our sense of duty to one another. We’re told to “keep our noses out”, to look the other way, to not get involved. That is the part that we now need to unpick.
I’m not talking about the kind of overstep in each other’s lives that social media encourages – the judgements from the sidelines we make, but never act on. I mean the tangible, everyday noticing: a neighbour struggling to get to the shops, so you add their groceries to your list. Your child’s friend that looks pale and withdrawn, so you invite them for dinner once or twice a week.
How do we nurture this in our communities? By getting to know the people around us, by helping our neighbours, by giving our time to others and by sacrificing self-interest for the sake of community. Is this a realistic expectation?
The vision I see for community hubs extends far beyond health and social care and into the heart of society… By doing this, we bring our combined strengths together and put them to work. And we stop leaving the entire burden to the formal social care system.
Of course, some will say: “But what can I do? I’m not a professional. Isn’t that what social care is for?”
The truth is, we are more equipped than we realise. To step in when grief has unravelled a child’s life, even just for a year or two, can be the difference between them flourishing or ending up in the system. To support an elderly neighbour with small acts of kindness can delay or even prevent their entry into formal care. Social care should never have to be all things to all people, it should be there when no-one else can be, for those who truly need it most.
Learning from communities that do things differently
If we look overseas for inspiration, we find the UK isn’t the only country tackling population aging. In Japan, there’s a project called Share Kanazawa, where older people, university students, local families and adults with learning disabilities live together in the same community. They share meals, conversation, and day-to-day life. The beauty of it is its simplicity: older people gain companionship and a sense of purpose, students gain affordable housing and the wisdom of daily contact with their elders and those with disabilities are included as equal members of the community. Everyone gives something, and everyone benefits. It’s a model rooted in relationships and it shows us what’s possible when we think differently about caring – not as a service to be delivered, but as a community to share our lives with.
In some Dutch cities, care homes invite university students to live alongside older residents rent-free, in exchange for spending time with them. The students might share meals, teach them how to use smartphones, or simply chat in the evenings. This intergenerational model helps reduce loneliness for older people while giving students affordable housing and a stronger sense of community.
In countries like Italy, Spain, and Portugal, family and neighbours still play a large role in looking after the elderly. For example, in rural villages, it’s common for neighbours to bring food, run errands, or check in on older residents. In some towns, local councils even coordinate volunteer networks where younger people “adopt” an older neighbour to provide regular company and assistance.
Denmark is famous for its “co-housing” (Bofællesskaber). These are intentional communities where elderly people live in small apartments but share common facilities such as kitchens, gardens, and activity rooms. Neighbours look after one another, cooking shared meals and checking in daily. This creates a balance between independence and social support without relying solely on formal care.
From 'me' to 'we'
As challenging as it is to admit, our obsession with the individual – with me and what I’m entitled to – is our downfall. If we want a society worth living in, we must build one. That means shifting from me to we.
At this time of year, I think we give ourselves permission to think more like these examples – to share together, to remind people we care about one another. The busyness of our everyday lives somehow stops that happening the rest of the time. But I don’t think this vision is outlandish or impossible or a fantasy – I see it in social care every day. I see it in my street every day and in the charities that work so hard to stop people falling and catch them when they do.
Building the society we want to live in
The question I have come away with in 2025 is this – what am I going to contribute? And if we all ask this question, and try to give more than we take, then we have a minimum of 30 million more people helping to care for our most vulnerable – and that can only be a good thing!
The 10 Year Health Plan may be a good policy start, but a good future would be something even bigger: a society where community is at the heart of caring for one another. Where prevention is not just a policy ambition, but a lived reality. Where we all carry a share of responsibility for one another.
Because care starts with community – and community starts with us.
