The first carer arrives at 8:00 a.m. She has an identification badge and a timesheet app on her phone. She clocks in. Her sixty minutes are allocated by a service procurement manager who has never been in this flat: fifteen for the transfer from bed to chair, twenty-five for washing and dressing, ten for a simple breakfast, ten for tidying. The contract, valued at twenty-two pounds an hour, stipulates these timings. A variance of more than ten percent requires an incident report. The movements are efficient, practiced, impersonal. They are not unkind. They are simply not a conversation. At 9:00 a.m., she clocks out. The system has recorded a successful care delivery outcome.
The second carer is the first one’s daughter. She does not have a timesheet. She arrives around 8:30 a.m., after dropping her own child at school. There is no contract. There is only the unspoken understanding that this is what daughters do. The transfer takes longer because her mother’s shoulder is stiff today. Breakfast is whatever is in the fridge, which the daughter bought yesterday. They talk about the neighbour’s cat and the rising price of bread. This part is not on any checklist. The daughter leaves when she can, late for her own job, a job that pays by the hour. Nobody clocks her out. Nobody calls it a care delivery outcome. They call it family.
Last month, the city council announced a new strategy for social care. They are calling it ‘Personalised Independence Planning’. The architecture of the language is beautiful, all clean lines and user-centric phrasing. It promises to move away from rigid, state-commissioned services and towards flexible budgets that put the individual ‘in the driver’s seat’. The council leader, in a press release dated October 2nd, 2024, celebrated a model that ‘empowers families and unlocks the potential of community support’. He did not mention that the total budget for adult social care is being cut by thirty percent over the next two years.
This is not a new idea. It is the oldest trick in the book of statecraft: Take a public responsibility, wrap it in the language of freedom, and make it a private problem. It redefines the work of holding a society together as a series of individual choices. The writer Silvia Federici identified this mechanism decades ago in her analysis of housework: unpaid labour is the invisible bedrock on which the entire visible economy rests. By calling it love or duty, you ensure it can never be accounted for, never be salaried, never go on strike. The council is not ‘unlocking the potential of community support’. It is privatising exhaustion.
It is also redrawing the map of the city. A city where care is a public utility requires infrastructure: accessible transport to get carers to clients and clients to clinics, subsidised housing so care workers can live in the city they serve, home adaptation grants that are fast and not means-tested. A city where care is a private matter needs none of these things. It assumes the daughter lives nearby. It assumes she has a car. It assumes she has a job that will accommodate her perpetually leaving late. It assumes the person needing care has a community to call upon, and that this community has infinite time, energy, and money. It is an urban plan drawn for a world that does not exist. The documents are full of diagrams showing circles of support, radiating out from the smiling stick-figure in the centre. They look less like a plan for a city and more like a diagram of a debt structure.
I know the smile that makes this all work. I used it in May 2018, at a friend’s wedding reception in a restored warehouse with three steep concrete steps at the entrance. Everyone knew. Nobody had mentioned it. When I arrived, a half-dozen well-meaning men rushed forward, offering to lift my chair. I smiled, said thank you, and let them. The smile was the currency I paid to make them feel good about their sudden, clumsy solution to a problem they had all quietly ignored for months. It made the moment smooth. It allowed the party to continue. The smile said, This is fine. I am fine. You have done a good thing. Later, alone in a hotel room, my hands shook for an hour. Not from the indignity of being