Realities of Neighbourhood Care: The interactions between statutory, voluntary and informal social care

Abstract

In the light of the appreciable ambiguities about the nature of both neighbouring and neighbourhood care, in fact neighbourhood care may not be a very useful focus for analysis at all. The relationships between forms of care in which we are most interested, and between those forms of care and other structures of society, may well best be grasped if we abandon the ‘problem’ of neighbourhood and neighbourliness for the time being and instead redefine our concerns in terms of the distinction proposed by the Wolfenden Committee between the formal and the informal systems of care. Moving away from the essentially spatial references of the notion of neighbourhood towards the more thoroughly social conception implicit in that distinction may be the breakthrough which earlier forays into the maze of definitions of neighbourhood and its related categories seemed to demand. Perhaps we should now approach the matter a different way — by asking in what ways within an overall system of social care the formal and informal sectors could be drawn together in highly localized sites (neighbourhoods) in complementary, mutually supportive relationships.