Choosing Care: Dilemmas of a Social Market

Abstract

The Department of Health's Green Paper, Independence, Well‐being and Choice (2005) is subtitled ‘our vision for the future of social care for adults in England’. This article will use the lens of a personal experience of caring to reflect upon its proposals. It does so within the wider context of recent debates on the potential for a human rights culture within community care. The article begins with an outline of the Green Paper itself and then moves on to the case study. Thereafter, the discussion considers the wider issues which are raised by this example of community care for vulnerable adults. The concept of independence, expressed as user choice in a social market of care, is central to the Green Paper. Market provision involves contractual relations, yet the Green Paper is not framed within an explicit discourse of rights. Instead, the vision of market‐based independence is to be achieved through improved policies and practices by social care providers and through the development of appropriate public regulatory mechanisms. In line with recent feminist critiques of present welfare provision, critiques that are based on an ethic of care, I conclude that the starting point for policy and legal development should be the necessary interdependence of individuals.