Dealing with drift: Comparing social care reform in the four nations of the UK

Reform of social care for older and disabled people has become a pressing political issue, given demographic change and shifting public expectations. In the UK, social insurance for long-term care wasn't included in the post-war welfare state and remains unfinished business. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with policy stakeholders and analysis of policy documents, the concept of policy drift is used here to explain the incomplete and variable progress on social care funding reform in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Each nation has jurisdiction over its own care system and each has taken a different path towards introducing a form of risk pooling for social care. Of the factors which are known to create policy drift (e.g., veto players, complexity, agenda overload), Scotland has the least of these and England the most. This is consistent with the reform trajectories in which Scotland has gone furthest on care funding reform, introducing free personal care in 2002, whereas England has lagged behind the others and is only now introducing reform. The article contributes to the drift literature by exposing its comparative element: polities define their progress or justify their delays in reference to their neighbours.