Introduction

Our characterisation of British informal caring as ‘sitting on the doorstep’ indicates a pattern of care in which the private, public and social spheres of welfare interact to produce highly individualised and precarious caring strategies.

Common to the experiences of carers in Britain is that their caring strategies shift around within the support triangle of family, the social sphere and formal services, depending on changing circumstances and needs. While the home and family remain central to their experiences, the private, social and public spheres of care appear less separate and mutually exclusive to the lives of carers than in the German societies. Carers in Britain typically combine care, employment and wider voluntary and social activity, and care is shared with partners.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the welfare context of informal care in Britain, drawing on social policy debates around informal welfare, and discussing the impact of the recent community care legislation at national and local levels. The case studies are presented in the second section, introducing the three British categories of carer strategies. In the third section, we discuss the cases in the light of salient themes in the British welfare context and consider comparisons with the two German contexts.

Formal and informal welfare in Britain

The cultural basis of welfare

The British welfare state is embedded in a long and influential tradition of liberalism, which espouses a notion of freedom through individual responsibility and the limitation of state provision (Esping-Anderson, 1990; Chamberlayne, 1999). This philosophy, returned to under Margaret Thatcher, has formed an ideological counterpoint to the postwar welfare state ideals of equality and citizenship, which informed many of the developments in welfare between 1945 and 1979 (Douglas and Philpott, 1998).

Freeman and Rustin (1999) argue that these two traditions in welfare form the dual anchoring of the British welfare system. They are expressed in the coexistence of collectivist values of equality of opportunity and provision through the welfare state, and the liberal individualist values of private education and home ownership, for example, as well as in the personal enhancement of life chances through market mechanisms (p 9). As a result, British social policy developments are characterised by contradictory policies, which shift between universalist aspirations (as realised, for example, in child benefit payments) and selective, meanstested provision according to need (many of the social security policies) (Hartley, 1994).