The class that designed adult social care

The argument so far in this series has been deliberately structural and deliberately impersonal. The safeguarding regime fails in two directions because it has lost the capacity for proportionate judgement; the failure does not propagate into reform because the regime lacks the apparatus to learn; the wrong decisions are not corrected because the people on whom they fall are structurally selected for inability to mount correction. The diagnosis has been careful not to depend on the character of any individual professional or the moral failings of any class. Functional stupidity, in Alvesson and Spicer's frame, is what organisations produce in cognitively capable people. The structural argument does not need to indict anyone.

This essay is the moment in the series where that careful avoidance loosens. Not because the structural argument was wrong — it was not, and the seven preceding pieces are still load-bearing — but because there is an additional question those pieces do not answer. The question is: why these design priors? A regime can be structurally broken in many possible ways. English adult social care is broken in one specific way, with one specific set of institutional defaults: institutional placement as resolution, family closeness as suspicion, domestic care as a problem to be managed rather than an asset to be supported. Where did those particular defaults come from?

A note on what this essay is and is not. The strongest analytical claim it makes — and the claim the rest of the piece is best read as developing — is the general one: institutions encode the assumptions of the people who design them, and therefore systematically misrecognise the family forms and lived experiences outside those assumptions. That claim is well-grounded in the sociology of organisations, in feminist institutionalism, in disability studies, in welfare-state scholarship, and in science-and-technology studies. The narrower interpretive claim this essay develops — that a specific demographic class shaped English adult social care's specific design priors over a specific period — is an application of the general principle to one particular case. The application is supported by what is publicly known about who designed the system and what their social context was, but it is not demonstrated to the standard of an archival policy-history. It is presented here as an interpretive hypothesis that helps explain the system's observed pattern of design blindness. Other interpretive frames — austerity politics, New Public Management ideology, the collapse of local-government finance, risk-management culture, deinstitutionalisation, NHS/social-care fragmentation, privatisation — are also at work, and the class-cultural argument should be read as one interacting factor among several rather than as the master variable.

An observation, made twice

Two scenes, separated by years and recorded by different observers. The first was reported to me secondhand:

The second was a direct encounter at one of the networking events the first man attended, or one structurally identical to it. The observer was deliberate; the encounter was several years after the first observation; the observed population was demographically continuous.

Two observations are not a population study. What they offer is the texture of a demographic that the British sociological literature has been studying with more rigour for forty years.

What the sociology has been saying for forty years

The British academic literature on this phenomenon is unembarrassed by it. Pat Thane's work on the history of old age in Britain, Sara Arber's sociology of ageing and gender, Bill Bytheway's research on age relations, and a substantial body of more recent work in Ageing & Society and the Journal of Aging Studies have, between them, documented the pattern in clinical detail.^[1] The pattern has names. Learned dependency, in the geriatric medicine literature. Occupational identity collapse, in the role-loss tradition descending from Robert Atchley's 1976 work on retirement.^[2] Hegemonic masculinity in retirement, in the Connell tradition.^[3] The terms vary; the phenomenon is consistent.

The phenomenon is specifically a property of one demographic. The post-war British professional and managerial class, predominantly male, predominantly white, predominantly from grammar-school and (later) Russell-Group-equivalent educational backgrounds, predominantly trained between roughly 1960 and 1985 in organisational settings where the gendered division of domestic labour was structurally complete. In those settings, the senior man was supported, in roughly this configuration:

• A wife who managed the household, the family's social calendar, the children's schooling, the parents-in-law, the holidays, the meals, the doctor's appointments, the laundry, the shopping, the cooking, the cleaning, and the maintenance of friendships outside work.
• A secretary who managed the diary, the correspondence, the travel arrangements, the expenses, the office relationships, and the institutional flow of paper that constituted his professional work.
• An organisation that supplied the role, the title, the team, the office, the schedule, the lunch, the pension contributions, and the recognition.

The man's contribution was the judgement at the top of this stack — the senior decisions that the organisation existed to extract from him. He was not lazy. He worked long hours, often very hard. But the work was a thin layer on a deep substrate of domestic, administrative and organisational support that other people, almost exclusively, did. When the substrate ended — through retirement, through his wife's death, through the secretary's redundancy in the early-1990s flattening of corporate hierarchies — the man often discovered, sometimes suddenly, that he could not do the things the substrate had done. Not because he was incapable of learning. Because he had spent forty years not learning, and the not-learning had, by then, become structural.

The gender division of unpaid work in the UK across the life course is well-documented. ONS time-use data and the 2021 UK census show that the gender division of unpaid domestic and care work remains highly unequal across the life course, with women accounting for 59% of all unpaid carers in the UK and older men consistently doing substantially less unpaid domestic work than women of the same age.^[4] The pattern is consistent across decades of survey rounds, with variation by socio-economic group that has been examined less systematically and on which the published data are less granular than is sometimes claimed in commentary.

The loneliness and social-isolation literature documents a related pattern. Men retiring from professional or managerial roles face a recognised vulnerability — workplace identity loss, loss of routine, contraction of social networks that had been mediated through work — which the policy literature has addressed through community-based interventions, most visibly the UK Men's Sheds Association and the related work in the 2018 Government loneliness strategy.^[5] The published evidence on these interventions documents the general retirement-transition vulnerability the strategy was designed to address. The sharper diagnostic claim sometimes made — that a specific class of men entered retirement with no maintained friendships outside their workplaces, no domestic competences, and no internal resources for unstructured time — is, beyond the general retirement-transition pattern, an interpretive extrapolation rather than a directly evidenced finding. The pattern observable in the loneliness literature is real; the precise class-specific version of it is more contested, and the careful reader should treat it accordingly.

None of this is news. It is the standard finding of British social gerontology, restated with mild variations every five years since at least 1985.

From a class condition to a national infrastructure

If the analysis stopped here, it would be a familiar observation about a familiar demographic and would not belong in this series. The bridge to the safeguarding argument is the next move, and it is the move that matters.

The demographic this essay has described is also, on the publicly available evidence about who has held senior positions in English adult social care policy and administration over the last fifty years, the demographic that has disproportionately designed and run it. The Department of Health and Social Care's senior civil service, the strategic layer of the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services, the policy advisers in the Cabinet Office, the chairs of the major learning disability and elderly care charities, the senior partners of the consulting firms that wrote the major reports, the chief executives of the largest care home groups, the senior judges of the Court of Protection, the academics whose textbooks define the field — the senior layer has, in successive published-biographies and Who's-Who profiles over the period 1960–2010, been demographically continuous with the description above. Not exclusively, and the picture has shifted in the last fifteen years as women have moved into senior positions in social services and the senior civil service, and as the diversity profile of senior public administration has slowly broadened. But the design layer of the system as it currently operates was shaped over those long decades by this demographic in disproportionate share, and a reasonable interpretation of the institutional architecture that resulted is that it reflects, to a substantial extent, the lived assumptions of the people who built it.

The lived assumptions are visible in the design. Consider three operating defaults of English adult social care.

Default to institutional and means-tested provision.

English adult social care relies more heavily on residential and means-tested models than the Nordic universal-care systems or the southern European family-care systems, and has historically underinvested in domiciliary support relative to several continental northern European systems.^[6] This is the defensible comparative claim. The OECD's Health at a Glance 2023 reports that, on average across OECD countries, 69% of formal long-term-care recipients receive care at home, with substantial variation from 34% (Portugal) to 95% (Israel); England is not uniquely institutional by this measure, and other comparable jurisdictions also maintain substantial residential infrastructure. What is distinctive about England is the combination of relatively limited cash payments to family carers, relatively limited public domiciliary provision, and the means-tested gateway that channels people into private residential provision when family or domiciliary options are not viable. Survey data consistently shows British people, across class and ethnicity, prefer to keep relatives at home where possible. The pattern is not, primarily, about British family preferences. It is about which options the system makes available, supported, and procedurally easy. The design has preferences, and the design's preferences are not always the population's preferences.

Family closeness as suspicion.

The safeguarding training checklists in widespread use across English local authorities — drawing on materials such as the Leeds City Council One Minute Guide on Professional Curiosity, the Norfolk Safeguarding Adults Board materials, and the disguised-compliance framework discussed in the second piece in this series — encode a set of indicators that include, in various combinations: controlling behaviour, financial dependency, social isolation, refusal to engage with services, and criticism of professionals.^[7] These indicators operate, in practice, as flags. The structural problem is that the same surface signs — multi-generational household, intense and exclusive caring relationship, family-structured life around a vulnerable member, family resistance to handing decision-making to professionals — register as warning signs to the checklist's eye, while in many British families (Sicilian, Filipino, Nigerian, Pakistani, working-class British, and other intensively-caring configurations) the same patterns describe normal family life. The checklists' authors, drawing on the genuine cases of coercive control that exist, did not design the indicators with awareness of how the same surface signs would read in family configurations they were not personally familiar with. This is the design-blindness mechanism in operation: the categories were not wrong for the families they were designed around, but they perform less reliably when applied to families with different structural patterns.

Domestic competence as a problem to be managed.

The Care Act 2014's substantial commitment to "personalisation" and "Making Safeguarding Personal" — the architecture by which adult social care is supposed to be designed around the individual's expressed preferences — is, in practice, largely understood by the system as a question about the cared-for person's preferences. The carer's preferences, knowledge and competence are a separate category, often barely surfaced at all. The Independent Mental Capacity Advocate exists for the cared-for person; there is no IMCA-equivalent for the family carer. The Care Act recognises the carer's right to an assessment of their own needs, but the resulting assessments are, on the published evidence from Carers UK's successive State of Caring surveys, characteristically thin and the resulting support packages characteristically minimal.^[8] The architecture treats the carer as an input to the care plan, not as a competent decision-maker whose lived expertise is the most valuable single asset in the case. A reasonable interpretation is that the writing reflects the design class's experience of family life, in which the substrate of domestic competence was supplied by other people in named roles, and the question of competent decision-making as a domestic capability was rarely surfaced.

This is not a charge of malice. It is a description of design blindness: the structural mechanism by which institutions encode their designers' assumptions and then misrecognise the populations whose lives are structured differently. The Care Act drafters did not write the Act with the intention of disadvantaging families they did not understand. They wrote a coherent statutory framework, drawing on what they themselves knew about family, care, and the proper relationship between the state and the household. What was familiar — a class-specific configuration of family life in which the state's role was the substitute for domestic competences their class had not personally developed — appears in the Act as the default. What was unfamiliar appears as a complication to be managed.

A note on what else is at work

The class-cultural design-priors hypothesis is one factor among several in producing the system English adult social care has become. The other factors are well-documented in the welfare-state literature, and any honest version of the argument names them: the LASPO legal-aid collapse and the access-to-justice apparatus discussed in the previous piece; the local-government finance crisis that has produced the social-care funding shortfall; the New Public Management ideology that translated public-service relationships into contractual ones in the 1980s and 1990s; the deinstitutionalisation movement of the 1980s and 1990s that closed the long-stay hospitals without building the community infrastructure to replace them; the privatisation of residential and domiciliary provision that has left the sector dominated by for-profit operators; the demographic ageing that has continuously raised demand against constrained supply; the NHS/social-care fragmentation that has meant care needs are processed across two systems with different funding rules and different cultures; and the risk-management and defensive-practice culture documented in the diagnostic essay earlier in this series. Each of these is independently consequential. The class-cultural argument is not advanced here as a replacement for these factors but as an additional one whose contribution policy discourse rarely names, partly because the people doing the naming have, themselves, often been members of the demographic the argument describes.

A shorter Graeber observation

One further analytical move is worth making briefly, because it sharpens one aspect of the cultural diagnosis without bearing the weight some readings would put on it. The anthropologist David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs (2018) argued — controversially, and on contested empirical grounds — that a substantial fraction of contemporary professional and managerial work consists of organisational ritual whose primary function is to reproduce the apparent necessity of the role.^[9] Whether or not the strong form of Graeber's thesis holds, a milder version is broadly accepted across organisational sociology: that senior managerial roles often combine genuine substantive work with significant ritual content, and that the ritual content can be experienced by its practitioners as if it were the substantive work. This is relevant to the present essay because the procedural complexity of safeguarding — the multi-agency conferences, the strategic safeguarding plans, the section 42 enquiry frameworks, the integrated-care-system architecture, the Safeguarding Adults Board governance structures, the annual reports, the thematic analyses, the partnership working groups — has the texture of organisational ritual familiar to anyone who has worked in the layer of British organisational life the design class came from. The procedural ritual is not invented from nothing; it is the form of organisational life the design class knew. Whether the activity is producing the outcomes it claims to produce is a separate question, and the corporate-stupidity diagnosis that opened this series suggests the answer is often less clear than the architecture's elaborateness implies.

This is a more modest claim than the developed Graeber-as-explanatory-pillar version some readings of an essay like this might expect. The modest version is what the available evidence supports. The stronger version — that retired men attending networking events do so because they need to be told their working lives were real — is psychologically speculative and is not advanced here.

The implication for the families

The structural consequence falls predictably. Families that do care — families whose lived experience of family life resembles the experience the international carers described in the supporting essay on the filtered workforce, or the working-class British and minority ethnic British families who do a disproportionate share of unpaid care work — encounter a safeguarding system whose default categories often do not include them. Their family configurations register as anomalies. Their close caring relationships register as suspicious. Their refusal to delegate to the state registers as resistance to professional involvement. Their pointed criticism of council conduct registers, on the disguised-compliance framework, as evidence of something to hide. They are not, in the categorical sense, fully seen, because the system was not designed to see them.

This is one version of why English adult social care fails the families it most needs to support. It is not, primarily, that frontline workers are stupid or callous; the corporate-stupidity diagnosis already established that the workers are doing what the structure rewards them for doing. It is that the structure rewards them for applying categories that, on a reasonable reading of how those categories operate, do not describe the families they are now applied to as well as they described the families they were designed around. The categories are not wrong. They are imprecisely calibrated for the families they are now applied to, and the imprecise calibration falls in a predictable direction: against the family configurations the design class did not, themselves, live in.

The Care Act 2014 was drafted, in significant part, with the support and judgement of senior civil servants, senior local government officers, senior charity directors and senior academics whose own family lives — as a generational and class fact — were organised around the institutional substitution of domestic competence. A reasonable interpretation is that the Act they drafted reflects that organisation. When it encounters family configurations that did not produce its drafters, it does not always have the categorical equipment to see them as configurations of care. It sometimes sees them as deviations from a norm. The norm is, partly, the design class's life. The deviation is, partly, everyone else's.

What this changes about the reform argument

The earlier pieces in this series proposed an AAIB-equivalent investigation body, restoration of civil legal aid, an Independent Family Advocate analogous to the IMCA, and a regulated right of audience for trained McKenzie Friends in Court of Protection proceedings. All of those proposals remain valid. None of them, individually or together, directly addresses the design-blindness issue this essay has tried to name.

The deeper reform implication is about who designs the next iteration of the system. The Casey Commission's 2026 work will shape the immediate future of English adult social care, including the National Safeguarding Board the Health Secretary has agreed to create. The composition of the Commission, its evidence base, and the demographic profile of the people it consults will, on the argument advanced here, partly determine whether the next iteration is designed with the same priors as the current one or with different ones.

The relevant test is empirical. Look at the membership of the Casey Commission and the advisory panels around it. Look at the demographic profile of the senior officials who will translate its findings into legislation and regulation. Look at the consultation processes by which families will be asked, or not asked, what they need. Look at whether the international carers whose lived comparison shows what English care has lost are invited to the table or left in the staff rooms. Look at whether the working-class, minority ethnic, and intensively-caring British families whose configurations the current system can sometimes fail to see are positioned as design partners or as objects of design.

The configuration of the design layer is one predictor of the configuration of the design. If the Casey reforms are built by a panel that demographically resembles the panels that built the Care Act, the resulting system may display some of the same design blindnesses. If the design layer is broadened — substantively, not cosmetically — the result has a chance of looking different. The reform is partly upstream of the proposals. The reform is partly who proposes.

The essay's title — the class that designed adult social care — is the cleanest formulation of the argument I could produce, but it is also the formulation most likely to be misread. The argument is not that the men in the second scene are bad people. Some are kind. Some did, in their working lives, useful things. The argument is that they are people, and people design systems out of what they know, and what this class knew about family, care and competence was a class-specific configuration that has been, on a reasonable interpretation of the available evidence, one of several formative operating priors of English adult social care over the period 1960–2010.

The system reflects, in part, the people who made it. The people who made it had, as a class and in their generation, particular configurations of lived experience that became, in interaction with the other forces named earlier in this essay, part of the design priors of national infrastructure. The priors do not change unless the design layer changes.

That is the eighth piece in the series. What remains is the journalism — the specific pieces, the specific cases, the specific outlets, the specific moments at which the argument can land. Those are operational questions, not analytical ones.

Sources

Sources tagged by evidence tier: [R] peer-reviewed research; [S] statutory, regulatory or official source; [J] journalism; [I] interpretive synthesis.

1. [R] Thane, P. (2000). Old Age in English History: Past Experiences, Present Issues. Oxford University Press. Arber, S. and Ginn, J. (1991). Gender and Later Life: A Sociological Analysis of Resources and Constraints. Sage. Bytheway, B. (1995). Ageism. Open University Press. See also more recent work in Ageing & Society (Cambridge University Press) and the Journal of Aging Studies (Elsevier).

2. [R] Atchley, R. C. (1976). The Sociology of Retirement. Schenkman. Originating statement of the role-loss thesis. Subsequent development in Atchley, R. C. (1989), 'A Continuity Theory of Normal Aging,' The Gerontologist 29(2): 183–190.

3. [R] Connell, R. W. (1995). Masculinities. Polity. Subsequent work on hegemonic masculinity in retirement: Calasanti, T. and King, N. (2005), 'Firming the Floppy Penis: Age, Class, and Gender Relations in the Lives of Old Men,' Men & Masculinities 8(1): 3–23.

4. [S] Office for National Statistics, Time Use in the UK dataset and bulletins, periodically updated: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personalandhouseholdfinances/incomeandwealth/datasets/timeuseintheuk . Office for National Statistics, 2021 Census — Unpaid care, England and Wales: women account for 59% of unpaid carers across the UK: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/healthandwellbeing/bulletins/unpaidcareenglandandwales/census2021 . See also OECD (September 2025), Gender Gaps in Paid and Unpaid Work Persist: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/gender-gaps-in-paid-and-unpaid-work-persist_25a6c5dc-en.html

5. [S] Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (October 2018), A Connected Society: A Strategy for Tackling Loneliness — laying the foundations for change. UK Government Loneliness Strategy: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/a-connected-society-a-strategy-for-tackling-loneliness . UK Men's Sheds Association: https://menssheds.org.uk/ . The general retirement-transition vulnerability is well-documented in the loneliness literature; the sharper class-specific diagnostic version sometimes presented in commentary is an interpretive extension rather than a directly evidenced finding.

6. [S] OECD (2023), Health at a Glance 2023: OECD Indicators, Long-Term Care chapter: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2023/11/health-at-a-glance-2023_e04f8239/full-report/long-term-care-settings_0040e8ef.html . On average across OECD countries, 69% of those receiving formal long-term-care benefits receive care at home, with substantial variation by country (34% Portugal, 95% Israel). See also Lee, S.-H., Chon, Y., and Kim, Y.-Y. (2023), 'Comparative Analysis of Long-Term Care in OECD Countries,' Healthcare 11(2): 206: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9858923/ . OECD (2025), Health at a Glance 2025: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/11/health-at-a-glance-2025_a894f72e

7. [S] Leeds City Council (2025), One Minute Guide 202: Professional Curiosity. Norfolk Safeguarding Adults Board (2024), Professional Curiosity. The disguised-compliance framework as applied in safeguarding training is discussed at length in the diagnostic essay in this series, The architecture of corporate stupidity in adult safeguarding, with citations to the underlying Safeguarding Network materials.

8. [S] Carers UK, State of Caring annual surveys (2022, 2023, 2024, 2025), with consistent findings on the thinness of carer's-assessment support packages and the under-recognition of carer competence by the adult social care system. State of Caring 2023: https://www.carersuk.org/reports/state-of-caring-2023-report/

9. [I] Graeber, D. (2018). Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Allen Lane. The work is influential but contested empirically. For the milder version of the organisational-ritual observation invoked here, see also Spencer, D. (2018), 'Fear and hope in an age of mass automation,' New Political Economy 23(4): 459–471.

Compiled · May 2026 · For research and journalism use