As The Beatles never quite sang, ‘It was 20 years ago today, Derek Wanless taught the band to play.’ Well, almost. The Wanless report on social care was in fact published in March 2006 and although for a while it seemed possible it might deliver a breakthrough on care reform, the band never really got the hang of it.
In truth, the Westminster band have not got the hang of anything much to do with social care for the past three decades and we still await that elusive hit record. Baroness Louise Casey and her team are now in the studio and working on a new album, but it is not due for release until 2028. We are promised a single later this year.
The Wanless report, Securing Good Care for Older People, is especially pertinent in 2026 because it specifically cast forward 20 years and examined what social care would be needed for older people and what funding arrangements should be put in place. Sir Derek Wanless, a former banker, had led an NHS review for Tony Blair’s Labour government but, to his frustration, been told strictly not to venture into social care. When The King’s Fund health and care thinktank subsequently invited him to do so, he accepted with alacrity and gave his time pro bono.
The resulting 310-page report found evidence of ‘significant unmet need’ for care and support among older people and, linking back to the NHS review, clear potential to shift more care out of hospital into the community. It proposed a partnership model of social care funding which would guarantee a minimum level of care for all but would incentivise people to top up their funding pot by matching their own contributions pound for pound up to a set cap. Beyond that, they could still top up further without match funding.
Sir Derek, who died in 2012, argued that the approach would end means-testing in care, encourage people to save for their older age and produce better value for money for the taxpayer than either the existing system or a model of free personal care. On the report’s 10th anniversary, in 2016, The King’s Fund’s Richard Humphries wrote in CMM that it had generated a strengthening consensus that care costs should not fall exclusively on either the state or the individual. However, he warned, ‘There are fresh fears that the issue has returned to the long grass.’
How right he was. As we wait for Casey and pray she will at last clear a way out of the long grass, or perhaps two different ways for older people and for working-age adults, we must hope that her team have dusted off a copy of the Wanless report and have been looking closely at the partnership principle as a potential foundation of the Government’s promised national care service. It is a principle surely even more of the times in 2026 than it was in 2006, giving concrete form to the oft-cited maxim that any lasting social care reform must be owned by all stakeholders.
Fans of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album will know that its eponymous opening track, harking back those 20 years, segues into With a Little Help from My Friends. How very apt.
David Brindle is a social care commentator and former Public Services Editor of The Guardian. Email: [email protected] LinkedIn: @David-Brindle