'A gloriously ordinary life': how to improve adult social care, and implementing the Children and Families Act

This month we speak to two members who have been leading investigations into improving adult social care and how the government has incompletely implemented the Children and Families Act.

‘A gloriously ordinary life’

‘We cannot keep asking families and friends to step up and take more and more responsibility for the adult social care services, while denying them some basic rights in terms of fair benefits and fair access to work.’

First, we speak to Baroness Andrews, who has been chairing the Lords Adult Social Care Committee. The committee's recent report, titled 'a gloriously normal life' has just been published. It makes several recommendations on what the government needs to do to improve social care. Listen to Baroness Andrew's interview to find out what the committee found as it spoke to people with lived experience of caring or care, and what the committee now wants the government to do.

‘What we heard from carers was the privilege of caring and how much they got out of it, how much they'd learned, for example, from growing up alongside a disabled child or how much they had learned from seeing their parent become a slightly different person from the one that they had been brought up with. It was a positive experience in terms of love and duty for so many, but most had never had a choice, and what we looked at as a consequence of that is what is going to happen in the future when there will be two million people in the next decade aging without children.’

· Find out more from the Adult Social Care Committee

‘A failure of implementation’

‘Sadly, we found that, due mainly to a lack of real focus on implementation and monitoring the implementation of the Act, it's really been a missed opportunity. And so many of the reforms as envisaged, just haven't taken place or haven't had the desired impact.’

Then we speak to Baroness Tyler of Enfield. Baroness Tyler has chaired the Lords committee investigating the government's implementation of the Children and Families Act 2014. In this interview, Baroness Tyler explains how a lack of scrutiny has meant the Act has failed to achieve its desired purpose and what the government can do to fix it.

‘We feel it's been a real missed opportunity to improve help, support and protection, particularly for vulnerable children and their parents.’

· Find out more from the Children and Families Act Committee

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