The UK’s social care system is failing to match people who need care with the workers who can provide it, leaving over 100,000 paid carer vacancies unfilled and millions forced into debt to self-fund their care. This project addresses a broken market: local authorities have lost a third of their spending power in a decade, care workers face low pay and crushing workloads, and rigid one-size-fits-all packages degrade the quality of at-home visits. ProjectCare builds a digital platform—modelled on the sharing economy—that lets individuals directly choose who cares for them and what tasks they perform, rather than accepting whatever a stretched provider offers. If successful, the platform would give citizens direct access to tailored services, give care providers new market opportunities, and give public bodies consolidated insight into local needs. The pilot runs in one geography before scaling across the country. This is not fundamental science; it is a practical market intervention that treats social care as a consumer service, aiming to disrupt an industry that currently offers neither choice nor dignity.
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The social care sector in the UK is best by crisis. Several, overlapping crisises are rolled into one. Local authorities are struggling to find adequate funding for social care, with their spending power reduced by over a third in the past decade, putting a massive strain on services. The means-tested approach to social care provision has not risen with inflation, pushing millions into debt as they are forced to self-fund their own care. The sector is best by a sever shortcare for care workers: demanding workloads and low pay have combined to create a vacancy list of over 100,000 paid carers. All these pressures are leading to a diminishing quality of care as care providers offer one-size-fits-all packages, limiting at-home visits by carers with strict time slots that do not allow enough time for good-quality care. Working with our partners, Sitekit are proposing a Platform-to-Consumer product -- ProjectCare -- that gives individuals choice and control over who cares for them and what tasks they do. ProjectCare: a platform and user interface - will disrupt the adult social care market, placing individuals at the centre of their care by matching those needing care directly with those that can meet their needs and ensuring that care is delivered on Buurtzorg-inspired, relationship-centered principles. Our approach is based on the hypothesis that business models adopted from elsewhere in the tech industry can help drive the personalization and improvement of care. Building on the 'sharing economy' model that has driven innovation in other sectors, we will disrupt current models of social care provision by creating a platform that gives its three member groups what they need: Citizens will get direct access to the types of services they need, delivered to them on a Buurtzog-inspired care model that will improve care outcomes. Social Care providers will get market access and opportunities and Public Bodies will enjoy a consolidated social care market and greater insight into current and future needs. ProjectCare will create a revolution in long-term care, by developing and piloting in one geography our platform, demonstrating results and then scaling progressively across the country. The platform will provide a framework that will eventually enable service providers such as home care providers, concierge services, home visitors, dog walkers, gardeners and even, potentially, drivers, to offer applicable services that will enable people to take more control of their care or their time if they care for others.
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