ABSTRACT
As the paper by the Association of County Councils (ACC) (1985) shows, the structure of the formal economy of health and social services depends more than anything else on the degree to which the central government and the health and social care agencies are willing to design and single-mindedly to implement a policy of ‘community care’ which improves the quality of life of dependents and defines the role of informal carers more equitably. The ACC guesstimates suggest that a policy which successfully attains these goals would be almost unimaginable without massively more efficient use of resources; enormous technical progress and achieving uniformly high performance in pressing against the limits of the welfare gains achievable from resources.
