ABSTRACT
The importance of the role of informal carers of the elderly has been widely acknowledged in the 1980s. In its 1981 White Paper, Growing Older, government expressed both its faith in the existence of a pool of carers ready and willing to assume family care responsibilities and its view that formal (state-financed) and informal care constitute alternative systems, rather than points on a single spectrum of provision for elderly people (Parliamentary Paper 1981). In the 1981’ document informal care was promoted over formal care both for reasons of costsaving and because it was felt that the effort to underpin informal care by state-financed provision ran the risk of introducing rigidities into the informal system, thereby destroying its chief virtue: ‘It is the role of public authorities to sustain and, where necessary develop—but never to displace—such support and care. Care in the community must increasingly mean care by the community’ (ibid.: 3).
