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Alison Tarrant and Lydia Hayes explain how certain regulatory changes have led to legal standards being potentially contravened behind care homes’ closed doors. Researchers and regulators now face an urgent mission to stop such violations and save lives.

Social care in Wales is in crisis. In recent years increasing numbers of people have been unable to access adequate or appropriate support, providers have relinquished unsustainable contracts with local authorities, careworker vacancies have increased, and informal carers have been pushed to their limits. These difficulties have been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, which has also revealed that the rights of older and disabled people receiving social care support are not always being upheld. It is essential that social care is stabilised in Wales as a matter of urgency. The need for social care reform is now broadly accepted. However, discussion remains focused on financing social care, and adjustments to the existing structures and forms of support. These are not currently achieving what is needed. Reform must be about something other than perpetuating what we have. This report focuses on two aspects of social care in Wales where reform is needed: exploring and reconceptualising the purpose of social care, and policy and provision of direct payments. Consideration of the purpose of social care is particularly necessary in the light of the potential incorporation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) into Welsh domestic law. The UNCRPD articulates the right of disabled people to live their lives on an equal basis with others, in terms of all life opportunities. Social care is fundamental to thousands of disabled and older people if they are to exercise this right, and must be understood as such. Discussion of social care in Wales is still dominated by narratives of individual dependency and reliance. The current legislative framework constructs social care as a ‘last resort’. Rather than maintaining this view of social care as an unwelcome necessity for some, reform should be centred on the principle that it is a valuable and desirable resource which liberates those using it and is fundamental to the realisation of social just

This thesis studies independent living as a counter-narrative of identity reconstruction devised by the disabled people’s movement to resist dominant social narratives of otherness, deficit, dependency and ‘care’. In particular it examines what happens to that counter-narrative when disabled activists have attempted to insert it into policy and law. It considers whether the counter-narrative can remain intact in this context and the implications – for disabled people and the counter-narrative itself – of the model that is constructed in the policy and legislative context. The policy field selected for the study is adult social care in Wales, where there are emergent governance institutions and an expectation of third sector involvement in policy development. Using texts from the disabled people’s movement as data, the study identifies how independent living functions as a counter-narrative and whether there are distinctions between the model constructed by the disabled people’s movement in the UK as a whole, and by the movement in Wales. Core fragments of the counter-narrative are identified and traced through into Welsh Government policy and legal texts. An analytical framework of narrative relationships of ‘adjacency’ and ‘collision’ is developed to examine these fragments and establish their use in the policy and legislative contexts. The study finds that while the attempted incorporation of independent living into Welsh adult social care policy has been partially successful, it has not yet succeeded in overturning master narratives that enable and perpetuate the structural and internalised oppression of disabled people. Both colliding and adjacent ideas were intentionally and unintentionally neutralised in policy and legislation, allowing master narratives to thrive. This was a result of multiple factors, including the collision at a fundamental level of certain core fragments of independent living and the principles of Welsh Government public sector policy, mis

This thesis studies independent living as a counter-narrative of identity reconstruction devised by the disabled people’s movement to resist dominant social narratives of otherness, deficit, dependency and ‘care’. In particular it examines what happens to that counter-narrative when disabled activists have attempted to insert it into policy and law. It considers whether the counter-narrative can remain intact in this context and the implications – for disabled people and the counter-narrative itself – of the model that is constructed in the policy and legislative context. The policy field selected for the study is adult social care in Wales, where there are emergent governance institutions and an expectation of third sector involvement in policy development. Using texts from the disabled people’s movement as data, the study identifies how independent living functions as a counter-narrative and whether there are distinctions between the model constructed by the disabled people’s movement in the UK as a whole, and by the movement in Wales. Core fragments of the counter-narrative are identified and traced through into Welsh Government policy and legal texts. An analytical framework of narrative relationships of ‘adjacency’ and ‘collision’ is developed to examine these fragments and establish their use in the policy and legislative contexts. The study finds that while the attempted incorporation of independent living into Welsh adult social care policy has been partially successful, it has not yet succeeded in overturning master narratives that enable and perpetuate the structural and internalised oppression of disabled people. Both colliding and adjacent ideas were intentionally and unintentionally neutralised in policy and legislation, allowing master narratives to thrive. This was a result of multiple factors, including the collision at a fundamental level of certain core fragments of independent living and the principles of Welsh Government public sector policy, mis